On The Translation Strategies Of Culturally-loaded Words From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie: A Case Study Of Xi Youji

Translation is more than the transfer of language symbols from one to another; itis essentially the communication between cultures. Compared with the language,culture plays an even more crucial role in the intercultural communication. Chineseliterary masterpieces are rich and abundant in culturally-loaded words; to study theChinese-English translation of them is of profound historical importance as well asimportant practical significance for a better show of China’s long history and richChinese civilization to the world. It is important to establish cultural identity of Chinesenation and enhance communication and deepen understanding between two cultures.The skopostheorie provides a new perspective for translation studies since the1970s, for the traditional translation theories have always focused on the perspective oflinguistics or pragmatics and shown more and more defects. According to Vermeer(1998), every action has a purpose, so does translation. The word “skopos”, then, is atechnical term for the aim or purpose of a translation.In this thesis, the skopostheorie and Newmark’s (2001) categorizations ofculture are employed to analyze the translation of culturally-loaded words in Xi Youjiand translation strategies employed by Anthony C. Yu. Firstly, through the classificationand statistics of the culturally-loaded words, some methods and tendencies ofculturally-loaded words translation are generalized. Then a detailed analysis of theseexamples are made to observe the translator’s overall translation strategies on the onehand, on the other hand the exploration of the translator’s motives for adopting thesestrategies so as to help deepen our understanding of the relationship between thetranslation theories and practice.The result of our research shows that Anthony C. Yu has a clear purpose in hismind when translating one of the most famous Chinese classic novels Xi Youji fromChinese into English, i.e. to introduce Chinese culture to westerners. Therefore, headopted the strategies of foreignization, including literal translation, literal translationplus annotation, transliteration and transliteration plus annotation, and complete translation of poems.