C-E Interpreting From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Chinese porcelain has a long and profound history. A thick cultural meaning is behind various kinds of different artifacts. The Porcelain Story is a full length televised documentary specially produced by CCTV, which demonstrates the impact of Chinese porcelain culture on the history of world civilization and its changing process. From the perspective of Skopos theory, this thesis is intended to explore the difficulties and strategies during the interpretation of this documentary.The Skopos theory claims that a translational activity is determined by its Skopos,which emphasizes the subjective initiatives of the interpreters, allowing them to adopt different strategies according to its skopos. According to this theory, strategies should be flexibly employed in interpreting based on the three principles, namely the skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule. Therefore, under its guidance, every purpose-oriented method is acceptable so long as a better communicative effect is achievable.Based on the consecutive interpreting of Porcelain Story(excerpt), this report will deliver some reflections after the completion of the task. The difficulties of this task mainly lie in the translation of redundancy in words and information, terminology and jargon and four-character chunks, etc. The strategies proposed for dealing with the difficulties mentioned above include omission, transliteration plus explanation as well as literal translation, aiming to maximize the faithful and fluent effect. It is hoped that this report will be helpful for similar text-based interpretation training and practice.