A Comparative Study Of English Translations Of Yuan Songs From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Tang poetry, Song lyrics and Yuan songs form the triangular-balanced peaks jointly in Chinese ancient literature, which are also the outstanding representatives of Chinese traditional culture. All these three ancient literature forms are influential both at home and abroad. Therefore, poetry translation, as a special field of literature translation, has attracted much attention of a great number of translators. Yuan songs are far less than Tang poetry and Song lyrics in number. In relation to the number of Yuan songs, translators pay less attention to the translation of Yuan songs in the process of studies of Chinese ancient poetry. Yuan songs include Za Ju (miscellaneous drama) and San Qu (the non-dramatic songs) which is the main research object in this dissertation. Two English versions of Yuan songs translated by Xu Yuanchong and Gu Zhengkun respectively are not published until the21century. In addition, poetry translation also draw translators’ notice and dispute. Firstly, translatabilty and untranslatabity of poetry have been disputed in the field of translation for many years. Besides, different people have different opinions toward the rules of poetry translation. Traditional poetry translation theory emphasizes equivalence in form, so this kind of translation theory pays more attention to the original text. However, due to the different cultural characteristics between China and Western countries, the equivalence in form usually can not gain a satisfying effect.Functionalist translation theory appeared until1970s in which Skopos theory is the core. Skopos theory assumes that the intended purposes of the translation activity determine the whole translation process and further includes three rules namely Skopos rule, coherence rule and loyalty rule. The biggest contribution of all of these rules is that they regard the purposes of translation as criteria by which to choose specific translation strategies and to decide what kind of content should be translated. Different translation purposes and strategies adopted by different translators lead to various translation results. This is also the reason why different translators may produce their own translated versions by applying different methods for the same original text.This dissertation chooses Skopos theory as the basic theory to make a comparative analysis between two English anthologies of Yuan songs translated by Xu Yuanchong and Gu Zhengkun. It should be noted that this comparison does not aim to point out which one is better than the other but to indicate that different translators with different intended purposes produce different translated versions. Chapter one introduces briefly the background and significance of this dissertation. Chapter two is literature review which retrospects previous studies in this field. Skopos theory and its three basic rules are presented in Chapter three. In Chapter four, the author applies Skopos theory and its basic rules to the analysis of Yuan songs and the conclusion is presented in the last chapter.With comparative study of English translation versions of Yuan songs in the light of Skopos theory, some insignificant efforts to the study of the translation of Yuan songs are hoped to make.