Skopos Theory Based Translation Of Classical Chinese Conversations

Cultural export has become one of the key missions of new phase of reform and opening up.Annuals of the Kingdoms in the East Zhou Dynasty was written in ancient Chinese by Feng Menglong,a Chinese historical novelist in the late Ming Dynasty.It describes over 500-year Chinese history which starts from the Chinese Kingdoms beginning to break apart into smaller states and ends with the first unification of the land accomplished by the First Emperor of Qin.The translation of classical work is not only of great significance in the spread of traditional Chinese culture and wisdom but also highly valued in the study of Chinese early-stage historical records.Conversations of different people in Annuals of the Kingdoms in the East Zhou Dynasty have their own characteristics,which make translation difficult.Translators need to decide whether to lead target text readers to source text writer,to create a target language-environment-oriented translation to meet target language readers' reading habit,or to search for a balance between two of them,making the translation accepted while delivering the original intention of source text writer to target text readers.Therefore,under the guidance of Skopos theory,the five chapters of this work are translated,with the total number of words being about 20000.The author researches the translation version from the lexical level,phrasal level,and sentence level respectively and deeply researches it from the conversations between monarchs and ministers,ministers and ministers,and ministers and common people.The author explores the translation strategies of such classical Chinese conversations in order to find a better translation effect.It is found that,at the lexical level,the personal pronouns and the social status of the characters correspond to each other,but different people use different personal pronouns,but they mean nothing more than “you” and “me”.Therefore,domestication strategy should be used to prevent confusion among target readers.At the phrase level,no matter which sides of the conversation,phrase translation strategies should be judged according to their cultural values,for the high cultural value phrase,the strategy of foreignization hasthe strong ability of maintaining source text writer's original intention when equivalence is achieved between source text and target text.On the contrary,domestication or the combination of the two is more suitable for low cultural value phrases.At the sentence level,in order to achieve the communicative purpose of the target language,domestication translation strategy should be the first choice.