Translation Of Address Terms In Lao Can You Ji From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Address terms are commonly used in people's daily life and can be easily found in literary works.They not only play a significant role in the smooth development of a communicative activity,but also reflect the complicated social relationship and social status between people in linguistic discourses.Address terms are an indispensable in people's daily communication as well as literary works.As one of the most excellent Chinese classical novels,Lao Can You Ji abounds in address terms.These terms not only indicate the social identity,social status and social relationship between characters,but also demonstrate profound cultural heritage embodied in those terms.Chinese address terms contain unique Chinese culture and tradition,so it is of great importance to correctly translate the semantic meaning and faithfully convey their cultural connotations in the translation of address terms.This will facilitate the target readers' interpretation of Chinese complex address terms and help the dissemination of Chinese culture.Skopos theory provides us with a new perspective toward the translation of address terms.Proposed in the late 1970 s,the Skopos theory breaks down the constraints of traditional equivalence-based linguistic translation theory and opens up a new path for translation studies.It put great emphasis on the function of the target text and pay special attention to the expectation of the target receivers.This theory maintains that translation is a purposeful communicative action and the Skopos or the purpose of a translation determines and justifies the whole translation process.The term “adequacy” rather than equivalence is taken as the criterion to judge the success of a translated text.The thesis just aims to do a research on the translation of address terms by comparing Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang's and Shadick's translation of Lao Can You Ji.Before an elaborate analysis,the paper investigates the translation Skopos of the two translators.It is found that both translators aim at spreading and disseminating Chinese culture.Then,for the convenience of the study,address terms are classified into five groups constituted by names,kinship terms,assumed kinship terms,honorifics and self-abasing terms.After detailed comparison and analysis,the author concludes that the Yangs' top priority is to offer a comprehensible and idiomatic target text,especially in the cases where neither corresponding words nor concise expressions can be found.Consequently,they choose domestication as their major translation strategy.Different from the Yangs,Shadick attempts to preserve Chinese cultural characteristics in the translation of address terms and spreads the implied Chinese cultural information contained in address terms to the intended readers.As a result,he mainly applies foreignization strategy.Due to his consistent efforts of foreignization,he successful preserves and reproduces the abundant Chinese cultural connotations loaded in address terms in most cases,achieving both intra-textual coherence and inter-textual fidelity.In this sense,Shadick's translation is more adequate to his translation purpose of spreading Chinese culture compared to the Yangs' version.