A Comparative Study Of English Versions Of Shu Pu From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Chinese calligraphy is the world intangible cultural heritage and with the increase of China's influence in the world,Chinese calligraphy also gets its international recognition.Shu pu by Sun Guoting of the Tang Dynasty is the most famous calligraphic classic,in which the author expresses his idea about calligraphy creation,calligraphic aesthetics,etc.Now,there are three English versions of Shu pu,namely,Sun Dayu's On the Fine Art of Chinese Calligraphy,Chang Ch'ung-ho and Hans J.Frankel's Treatise on Calligraphy and Pietro De Laurentis's Manual of Clligraphy.In the light of Hans J.Vermeer's Skopos theory,the thesis attempts to make a comparative study of two English versions of Shu pu.On the one hand,Sun Dayu and Pietro De Laurentis offer different translations of the title of Shu pu based on different translation purposes.On the other hand,a parallel corpus is built for the comparative analysis and the study shows that the number of total tokens and lexical words of Pietro De Laurentis's version are more than those of Sun Dayu's version,while Sun uses the wider range of vocabulary,the simpler words and the longer sentences than De Laurentis.Christiane Nord,one of the representatives of German Functional School,proposes documentary translation and instrumental translation.The comparative analysis reveals that Sun Dayu aims at attracting attention of western readers to traditional Chinese calligraphy,and the prospective target addressees are masses of foreign people who have little knowledge about Chinese calligraphy.As a poet and a translator,Sun Dayu adopts instrumental translation when rendering Shu pu.There are many amplifications,omissions and paraphrases in his version,reflecting a strong subjectivity of the translator.Pietro De Laurentis aims at providing both a strict philological and a calligraphy-focused interpretation of Sun Guoting's work,with the hope of conveying,as far as possible,a coherent idea of his aesthetic views and personal experience as a calligrapher and a calligraphy teacher.The assumed target addressees are western scholars who are interested in Chinese calligraphy,especially sinologists in the study of calligraphy.De Laurentis's version is a reproduction of the original text by imitating its lexical,syntactical and textual units,which offers a typical case of documentary translation.In summary,translators should firstly decide translation Skopos and then choose the most appropriate translation strategy according to the purpose.And the thesis advocates literal translation as a main strategy and liberal translation as a secondary one for the translation of calligraphic classics,which not only respects the primacy of ST,but also improves the reading experience of target addressees.For calligraphic aesthetic terms,the thesis suggests transliteration plus explanation for some conventional calligraphic terms.Finally,compensation is of necessity for some calligraphic culture-loaded words and allusions to spread calligraphic culture.