A Report On The Translation Of Records Of The General Conference Of The Protestant Missionaries Of China, Held At Shanghai, May10-24,1877(Excerpts)from The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Records of the General Conference of Protestant Missionaries of China held at Shanghai, May10-24,1877collects speeches and discussions of participants of the first conference of Christian missionaries in China. The collection is not only on missionary affairs, but also on Chinese social state, traditional customs, culture and education and so on, which is significant for the study of religion, history and culture in late Qing Dynasty.Under the guidance of Skopos theory, the author translates three parts of the book including Introduction, Entire Concentration Essential to Missionary Success and Principle of Translation into Chinese, aiming to study the guidance role of the Skopos theory in the translation of conference records, especially the guidance role of three rules of Skopos theory for the conference records translation.Skopos theory emphasizes that the purpose of the translation is the core of the whole translation which decides the adoption of translation strategies and methods in the course of translation. Firstly, based on the analysis of target readers and the purpose of original text, the author sets the purpose of the translation practice is to convey the information of original text to target readers effectively. Then, from levels of word, sentence and writing style, the report studies translation strategies and methods including free translation, amplification and omission, etc that the author adopts during the translation. Finally, in order to test the translation purpose, the author innovatively invites representatives of target readers to read the target text, collects the problems and suggestions from representatives and classifies them from the scope of translation error to direct the revise of target text.