Study On Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In The New Period Chinese Classic Literature From The Perspective Of Skopostheory

Translation is more than the transfer of language symbols from one to another; it is essentially the communication between cultures. Compared with the language, culture plays an even more crucial role in the intercultural communication. Chinese literary masterpieces are rich and abundant in culturally-loaded words; to study the Chinese-English translation of them is of profound historical importance as well as important practical significance for a better show of China’s long history and rich Chinese civilization to the world. It is important to establish cultural identity of Chinese nation and enhance communication and deepen understanding between two cultures.The skopostheorie provides a new perspective for translation studies since the 1970 s, for the traditional translation theories have always focused on the perspective of linguistics or pragmatics and shown more and more defects. According to Vermeer(1998), every action has a purpose, so does translation. The word “skopos”, then, is a technical term for the aim or purpose of a translation.In this thesis, the skopostheorie and Newmark’s(2001) categorizations of culture are employed to analyze the translation of culturally-loaded words in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio and translation strategies employed by Anthony C. Yu. Firstly, through the classification and statistics of the culturally-loaded words, some methods and tendencies of culturally-loaded words translation are generalized. Then a detailed analysis of these examples are made to observe the translator’s overall translation strategies on the one hand, on the other hand the exploration of the translator’s motives for adopting these strategies so as to help deepen our understanding of the relationship between the translation theories and practice.The result of our research shows that Anthony C. Yu has a clear purpose in his mind when translating one of the most famous Chinese classic novels Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio from Chinese into English, i.e. to introduce Chinese culture to westerners. Therefore, he adopted the strategies of foreignization, including literal translation, literal translation plus annotation, transliteration and transliteration plus annotation, and complete translation of poems.