The Application Of Skopostheory To Academic Translation

In the first part of this thesis, the author translates the Prologue and Chapter 1 of the monograph Dying Words:Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us written by linguist Nicolas Evans, into Chinese. In the second part, the translation review, the author discusses the application of skopos theory to academic translation. The source text, on the one hand, is a classic academic piece, with its scholarly wording, complex sentence structures and specialized knowledge, while on the other hand, its lively style of writing arouses the audience’s interest in language diversity. Therefore, the translation should reach somewhere academic accuracy meets readability, and the strategies adopted include paraphrase, annotation, syntactic linearity, restructuring, etc. Skopos theory helps to determine the appropriate translation principles and methods to be applied, with which the translator can stick to a specific style from cover to cover. The author believes that skopos theory could be of use in academic translation practice.