On Museum Commentary C-E Translation From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

With China’s further opening-up, museum commentary has become a sort ofsignificant medium in boosting the dissemination of Chinese culture. It aims to enable thevisitors to maximally acquire knowledge on China’s geography, culture and custom, andarouse their ardent love for China. Museum commentary generally belongs to the categoryof public signs in form and tourism texts in content. In the past few years, researches onmuseum commentary translation have begun to attract some scholars’ attention, but theyare restricted to the scattered studies of translation skills, which rule out of suitabletheoretical guidance and systematic support. Moreover, such researches set traditionaltranslation concepts of “faithfulness” and “equivalence” as their core, and neglect theextra-linguistic targets such as TT’s communicative purpose in TL situation, TT reader’sresponse and expectation.Under such circumstances, this thesis, taking Skopostheorie as its theoretical basis,conducts a systematic study on museum commentary C-E translation by way of contrastand comparison, case study, logical judgment, summarization and induction. Skopostheorieshifts its focus to the function or Skopos of TT, which liberates the translator from theshackle of complete equivalence. By taking Ningbo Bang Museum Commentary as anexample and drawing a close analysis on the failures of its existing translation, the authormakes clear the preliminary factors to be considered beforehand in the process of museumcommentary C-E translation. Enlightened by this finding, the author intends to formulate adirective model for museum commentary C-E translation, which illustrates the process oftranslation from the perspective of Skopostheorie and lays emphasis on three governingtranslation principles. They are TT’s communicative purpose oriented principle, targetreader centered principle and cultural transmission focused principle.With the investigation into the translation model applied to the translation of museum commentary, the present study is aimed to provide theoretic support for the study ofmuseum commentary C-E translation, leading it to the track featuring more systematic andcomprehensive. Meanwhile, it is also set to make contribution to the current practice ofmuseum commentary C-E translation in China, so as to better China’s culturedissemination to the outside.