On The English Translation Of Reduplicated Words In Northern Shaanxi Folk Songs

As the intangible cultural heritage of China,the status and value of Northern Shaanxi folk song are self-evident.Since Northern Shaanxi folk songs were successfully selected as the second batch of national intangible cultural heritage in2008,and the translated version of Northern Shaanxi folk songs named Voice from the Northwest(named Voices From China's Northwest in latest version)was published in2009,Northern Shaanxi folk songs have attracted unprecedented attention and more and more scholars have devoted themselves to the research and translation of them.As a kind of special lexical phenomenon,reduplicated words(RWs)exist widely in Northern Shaanxi folk songs.However,there are great differences between reduplicated words in English and those in Chinese,which makes the translation of reduplicated words more difficult.The extensive use of reduplicated words makes the folk songs catchy and vivid,helps express the rhythm,imagery and form of the folk songs incisively and increases the singing pleasure of the folk songs.Therefore,it is extremely necessary to study the English translation of reduplicated words in the folk songs of Northern Shaanxi.Skopostheorie regards translation as a kind of communicative activity with purpose and holds that the translator should,from the perspective of target audience,make necessary selection,processing or reorganization of the information in the source text,and pay attention to the expected function and communicative purpose of the target text in the context of the target language,which provides great guidance for the analysis of the English translation of reduplicated words in Northern Shaanxi folk songs.Skopostheorie has been widely used for operating instructions,advertisement,news text and tourism,but rarely been applied to the translation of songs,let alone to the English translation of reduplicated words of folk songs in Northern Shaanxi.Northern Shaanxi folk songs,with strong local features represent an epic of the Northern Shaanxi loess plateau in Northern China and make great contributions to theintegrity of Chinese culture.Therefore,the author attempts to apply Skopostheorie to the translation study of the reduplicated words of folk Songs in Northern Shaanxi.Based on Skopostheorie,this thesis conducts a detailed study on the translation of reduplicated words taken from Voices From China's Northwest.It mainly involves the translation methods used for the translation of reduplicated words and the practical effects reproduced in English translation.Voices From China's Northwest,created by Wang Hongyin with nine years laborious effort,is the Chinese-English version of Northern Shaanxi folk songs,which gains great acceptance and extensive attention from scholars at home.The findings of this research are that when dealing with the translation of reduplicated words in Northern Shaanxi folk songs,Wang Hongyin uses different translation methods according to different translation purposes.Firstly,considering the language and cultural habits of the target language readers,Wang Hongyin converted the dialect in the source text into English idiomatic expressions to ensure their understanding of the target text,and made every effort to make it natural with various forms of English poetry characteristics or speaking habits.For this reason,alliteration,end rhyme,onomatopoetic words are used.Secondly,in order to be faithful to the source text by introducing exotic flavor and profound national and cultural background to the audience,the partial tone,transliteration plus explanation and literal translation are used by Wang Hongyin to achieve the informative and vocative function of the translation.Thirdly,in order to achieve intra-textual coherence and establish the connection between the translation and the target-culture receivers,Wang Hongyin followed the coherence rule and adopted semantic translation,omitting translation and the conversion of personal dexis.This research is expected to provide a new research perspective for the study of English translation of Northern Shaanxi folk songs.