Comparative Research Into The Translation Of Culture-specific Items Of Records On The Warring States From The Perspective Of The Skopos Theory

The Chinese nation is known to enjoy a venerable history and brilliant culture. Ithas been a long-cherished wish of the Chinese people to introduce the cultural classicsto the rest of the world in an accurate and systematic way. At the dawn of the newcentury, it is also beneficial to enhancing China’s soft power in the growingly fierceinternational competition if Chinese classical culture goes global.As one of the masterpieces in traditional Chinese culture, Records on theWarring States gives us a detailed description of the political doctrines advocated bydifferent schools of intellectuals and statesmen. It takes an objective stance inrecording the manifold significant events during that period and paints a picture of thehistorical features and folklore of that time. Therefore, it is an important classic forcontemporary people to study the history of the Warring States period.As regards the translation of Records on the Warring States, there are largely twoversions. The first version is Chan Kuo Ts’e, published in1970and translated byAmerican sholar James.I.Crump, who was a well-known sinologist and a professoremeritus at the Department of Chinese Literature of Michigan University. The secondversion is Records on the Warring States, published in2008and translated by aChinese scholar named Zhai Jiangyue, who worked at the School of ChineseLanguage of Ludong University.The skopos theory is one of the most widely acclaimed translation theories for itsvalue in guiding the translational process. It is of particular significance for those whowork towards disseminating traditional Chinese culture across the world in an eradefined by growingly frequent intercultural communication. Traditional Chinese culture has not been well understood by the rest of the world.And this is exactly the reason why I have decided to choose this topic. It is anunavoidable subject for us to translate the classics and introduce them to the rest ofthe world in the twenty-first century. This paper explores in detail how we shouldapply the skopos theory to the translational activity with a view to disseminatingtraditional Chinese culture across the world.