A Report On C-E Translation Of The Multi-Cultures Of Northwestern Ethnic Minorities And China’s Western Development Drive（Section1-2, Chapter Ⅲ）

Through a translation under the Skopostheorie and study along with external structure, the present paper presents a focus on the English version of the Chinese text selected from the book The Multi-Cultures of Northwestern Ethnic Minorities and China’s Western Development Drive(Section1-2, Chapter III), and then makes a further exploration testifying the practicability of Skopostheorie and its combination with the realization of external structure of the target text.The paper is divided into five parts. Part 1 briefly introduces the translation task and philosophy of the report. Part 2 is translation theory framework. This part starts with text type, which determines choice of translation theory. And then, the part introduces the Skopostheorie and the corresponding principles, strategies and translation methods based on the idea that the source text here is informative. And lastly, the part uses a new concept: external structure, which is a dimension judging effects of target text and a significant reference for inspecting the quality of translation. Part 3 makes an overview of translating process including pre-translating preparations, while-translating activities and post-translating work. Part 4 is case analysis. The paper presents the key and difficult points in terms of lexical level, syntactical level, textual level, rhetoric figures, stylistic features, and cultural elements represented by culturally-loaded words. All these cases stand for those posing a challenge to the translator and the readers with English as native language. And Part 5 is conclusion. This part summarizes the translation task in accordance with the use of translation theory, and presents what it implies for translators in terms of translation theory and practice.In 1970 s, Hans Vermeer postulated the Skopostheorie, relieving translation study of source text-centered restrictions. Under this theory, pure linguistic activities are insufficient to complete translation practice, because translation is not merely and even not primarily a linguistic activity, and linguistics has not yet formulated the right questions to tackle translation problems. The theory regards translation as an action with a certain purpose and some results based on the source text. And it requires the translator to observe some rules, in which the Skopos rule is the first. That is, translation is determined by translation purpose. Besides, there are two other rules to observe: intratextual coherence and intertextual coherence. The former requires for inside coherence within the target text, which makes it readable for translation receivers, while the latter refers to the coherence between the target text and source text. These three principles suggest that the standard to judge translation is adequacy of the target text realizing targeted goal, rather than “equivalence”.Theoretically, the stress of Skopostheorie is translator-centered, taking the source text as “an offer of information”. This puts the translator’s subjectivity at full play. In translating, the writer sticks to the guidance by translation purpose, based on the information conveyed in the source text, and by means of native expression in target language. All this makes the target text more readable and acceptable for the target receivers.External structure is a new linguistic concept proposed on the basis of communicative property of translation. It stress that the translation shall be grammatically feasible and communicatively acceptable compared with surface structure and deep structure. It is an important factor besides linguistic elements. In particular, the translation shall avoid those expressions apparently inappropriate with target culture. External structure is a measurement for inspecting the quality of translation.Translation is a p urposeful activity crossing languages, cultures and communications. And thus, the translation shall not only meet the needs of grammar and conveying of meanings, but also take into consideration the cultural implications carried with the both languages and acceptability and feasibility in communicative terms.By translation methods, the writer adopts parataxis-hypotaxis converting. Chinese sentences are mainly construed in parataxix forms featured by more clauses, more verbs and less conjunction words. After being rendered into English, those parataxis sentences shall be consistent with English sentences structures, which will be added to junction words, with main information prominent and interlinguistic coherence enhanced.The paper is also an attempt to demonstrate a translation in compliance with the fluent and correct expressions in English and the anticipation of English readers through application of the Skopostheorie and external structure in the case analysis. This attempt implies an effort to improve the quality of translation and produce a better effect of rendering Chinese culture-related texts into English version.From the case analysis, it is found that the analysis of translation purpose and identification of the sentence structures of source text as well as the suitable sentence structure grammatically appropriate for conveying the information in source text and arriving at the communicative effect is a good way for the translators to observe, which makes it easy to be free from confinement of structures in source text.Meanwhile, it is recommended to take possible effect into account or avoid such expressions that have a b ad bearing on the context the target text, due to different cultures carried by the source language and target language, which is external structure of the target text called in this paper.The paper also presents some potential shortcomings in the translation, aiming at providing a r eference for the future exploration into translation theories as well as translation practice.