A Report On The Translation Of The Silk Road In World History (Chapter One)

The report is based on The Silk Road in World History written by Xinru Liu, the Professor of New Jersey University in America. This work is published by the Oxford Press in 2010, aiming to be an academic material for the European college students and the general readers. The work presents the origin and decline of the Silk Road and its status in world history. By describing the evolution of the Silk Road as well as the history and geography of the countries along this route, the work revives the vivid booming scene of the Silk Road at that time. According to Skopos theory, translation is a kind of cross-culture human communicative activity based on translator’s function with clear aims and intention. Skopos theory gets rid of confine of equivalent translation, and emphasizes the subjective initiative of translators. Therefore, it solves the problems that other translation theories can’t solve and breaks the confine to source text, then achieves the aim to instruct the translation of content-oriented materials like the Silk Road. Under the perspective of the Skopos theory, this report will explore the translation problems such as long and difficult sentences by thinking over and discussing the translation examples.The report is divided into five parts: the first part is Mission Origin which describes the background of the translation mission and the significance of this work; the second part is Mission Description which describes the author and content of the work as well as its language characteristics, and also describes translation Process including the preparation stage, translation process, revision and polishing of translation; the third part is Translation Theory Framework, mainly introduces the Skopos Theory and its instruction rules; the fourth part applies the Skopos Theory to the translation, mainly analyzes examples and discusses the translation methods; the finial part is Translation Summary and Enlightenment.