A Study On Guo Moruo’s Translation Strategies Of English Poetry From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

The thesis investigates Guo Moruo’s translation strategies of English poetry from theperspective of Skopos Theory. Guo Moruo translates foreign works throughout his literarycareer, while poetry translation accounts for a large proportion in his translation practices. Theacademic circles pay more attention to his literary creation and no systematic study on hispoetry translation from the perspective of Skopos Theory has been conducted. The thesis,taking The Selected Poems of Shelly as an example, aims to study Guo Moruo’s translationstrategies from the perspective of three rules: Skopos Rule, Coherence Rule and Fidelity Rule.German Functional Translation is advanced and developed by Reiss, Vermeer and Nordin the seventies of the20thcentury. Skopos Theory, as the most important theory in thefunctional school of translation, strives to liberate translation from the confines of source textand to study translation from the perspective of the translator. The translator, as one of themain participant in the translation activity, can adopt different translation strategies tocomplete the translation according to different translation purposes, namely,“the end justifiesthe means”.The thesis contains five parts. The first Chapter introduces Guo Moruo as a translator,motivation of the study, research methods and thesis structure. The second Chapter is areview of previous studies on Guo Moruo’s poetry translation at home and abroad, thushighlighting the motivation as well as the theoretical and practical significance of the thesis.The third Chapter introduces the origin and some chief notions of Skopos Theory. The fourthChapter analyses, from the perspective of Skopos Theory, Guo Moruo’s translation strategiesrespectively in poetic form, poetic content and poetic techniques. In poetic form, to cater tothe Chinese cultural mentality, Guo Moruo abandons the original rhyme, and translates theforeign metrical verse with traditional Chinese poetic form: Five-character quatrain,Seven-character quatrain and Lisao style. He creatively inherits Chinese classic poetrytradition and takes the best bits of foreign poetry. As to the poetic content, he translates thepoems elegantly and decently by exploiting combinnation of the Classical Chinese and theVernacular Chinese, and adopting various means such as recasting, addition and ommission ofwords. Concerning poetic techniques, Guo Moruo adopts such techniques as conversion ofparts of speech and monosyllabic adjectives for a better reflection of the ideas of the originalwork and revelation of the spirit of the times. He successfully translates poetry in the poeticway. By comparing the original text of The Selected Poems of Shelly with Guo Moruo’sversion, the author finds out that whatever translation techniques the translator employs, hisfirst concern is to cater to the Chinese cultural mentality and to make the translation easier for target readers to understand and accept. Guo Moruo’s translation achieves his intendedpurpose of inheriting and preserving the traditional Chinese culture and learning from theadvanced western ideas.