A Comparative Study Of Two English Versions Of Tsangyang Gyatso's Poems From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

Tsangyang Gyatso(1683-1706),was the 6th Dalai Lama of Tibetan Buddhism as well as a talented poet well-known in the world.The poems written by Tsangyang Gyatso were called Tsangyang Gyatso's Poems,which enjoyed great popularity and had been deeply rooted among the Tibetan people.It is not only the magnificent cultural treasure in the history of Tibetan literature,but also the unique gem in the literary history of the Chinese nation.Meanwhile,with its expanded spread and influence,Tsangyang Gyatso's Poetry,as a part of Chinese national classics,gradually leads both Chinese folk literature and Chinese classics of ethnic minorities to a new height,promoting the development of Chinese classics of ethnic minorities and the cultural exchange between Chinese and Western.Skopostheorie is one of the most important theories in functionalism,which holds that translation is a conscious and purposeful communicative activity and it determines the whole translation behaviors.Skopostheorie broke through the traditional equivalence theory,turning the research focus from the text level or the linguistic level to these factors behind the text such as the social,historical,cultural,personal factors and so on,which placed the translated versions in a more macroscopic field and added a new perspective for the literary criticism and research.Skopostheorie has three basic principles,namely,the skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule,among which the skopos is the primary principle and both of coherence rule and fidelity rule are subordinate to skopos rule.The thesis falls into three parts,namely the introduction,the main body and the conclusion.The introduction summaries the poet's life and his work,literature review of Tsangyang Gyatso's Poetry at home and abroad,research background and significance,the overview of Skopostheorie and the frame structure of this thesis.The main body is divided into three chapters.The first chapter probes into the two translators' purposes and their respective translation strategies on the basis of their educational background,research interest and translation features.The second chapter explores whether the two English versions achieve coherence in terms of imagery,rhetorical devices and syntactic structure.The third chapter is to investigate whether the two English versions are faithful to the source text in the three aspects of idea and contents,form and rhythm and poetic style.The conclusion concludes the research findings and then points out the limitations of this study so as to provide some reference for the future research.It is concluded that the translation of Yu Daoquan belongs to an academic translation with the main purpose of doing Tibetan linguistic research and academic exchange,while Li Zhengshuan's purpose is associated with the poetry appreciation and cultural transmission.As a result,Yu Daoquan mainly adopted the foreignization strategy and the word-for-word translation method,which made his translation version rich in the academic research on the one hand but insufficient in the poetic style on the other hand.Li Zhengshuan combined the foreignization and domestication strategy so as to enhance the readability and acceptance of its translation.Besides,in this way,its communicative function can be realized at the same time.As far as Skopostheorie is concerned,both of the English versions have achieved their translation purposes and can be considered as the distictive translaion with their own unique features.