On Translation Of Culturally-loaded Words In Yang Hsien-yi And Gladys Yang’s Selections From Records Of The Historian---from The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the continuous development of the world multicultural, China is absorbing excellent culture of the other countries and China’s splendid civilization also shines in the world stage. In the cultural communication of various countries in the world, how to accurately transfer the cultural meaning of the source texts are particularly important. Records of the Historian is the first general history in the form of a series of biographies, which also stands first among the Twenty-four Histories, It records the history of China from the era of Yellow Emperor, a legendary rule of Chinese nation to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty. As the most representative and outstanding history book in all of Chinese historical records, it has unique cultural values and has a profound influence on the development of the historical and literary works of later generations. Yang Hsien-yi is the first man who makes the world know about Records of the Historian. This thesis studies the translation of culturally-loaded words in Selections from Records of the Historian from the perspective of Skopos Theory.The Skopos Theory was put forward and developed by Hans. Vermeer, Reiss, Nord and so on in Germany in the late1970s. It focuses on the purpose during the translation process. More specifically, it includes three principles:Skopos Rule, Coherence Rule and Fidelity Rule. The core is the Skopos Rule, which exactly points out the decisive action of the purpose in the translation behavior and emphasizes the communicative function in the text conversion. The birth of the Skopos Theory highlights the status of the translator. Giving full consideration to a variety of internal and external factors in the process of translation. the translator adopts corresponding translation strategies and methods.In this thesis, under the guidance of Skopos Theory, the author tries to study Yang’s translation of culturally-loaded words by the methods of description and contrast analysis. It aims at exploring the translation purpose and the corresponding translation strategies. First of all, the author introduces the basic information about Records of the Historian, and then analyzes the definition and characteristics, classifications of culturally-loaded words. Later, the author gives the general theoretical background of Skopos Theory. Finally with numerous examples, the author studies Yang’s handlings of culturally-loaded words. Research results show that under the purpose of the dissemination of the Chinese excellent culture, Yang uses the translation strategy of foreignization in most cases. For some vocabularies which have distinct cultural characteristics, the translator usually adopts transliteration, literal translation, etc. For those which are relatively flexible, the translator also tries to transfer the cultural factors to keep the cultural characteristics for achieving the purpose of spreading Chinese excellent culture.