A Study On Translation Of Folk Songs Of Northern Shaanxi From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

Skopostheorie holds the idea that translation is an intentional interculturalinteraction. According to skopostheorie, the translation strategies are determined by thepurpose of the translation and the function of target text. Skopostheorie has been widelyapplied to the translation study of advertisement and tourism, and rarely applied to thetranslation of songs, let alone to folk songs. Folk Songs of Northern Shaanxi are epic inthe Loess Plateau, which records the development of history and folk culture in NorthernShaanxi. Therefore, the present author attempts to apply skopostheorie to the translationstudy of Folk Songs of Northern Shaanxi.The present author makes a descriptive analysis of the translation of Folk Songs ofNorthern Shaanxi from the perspective of skopostheorie. The present thesis chooses thework Voice From the Northwest as a case study. Voice From the Northwest, created byWang Hongyin with nine years laborious effort, is the Chinese and English versions ofNorthern Shaanxi folk songs, which gains acceptance from scholars at home.On the basis of the case study, the present author proposes the following findings.According to skopostheorie, the translation of Northern Shaanxi Folk Songs is apurposeful activity, and translations strategies are determined by translation purposes. Ofthe three rule of skopostheorie, the skopos rule is the top-ranking rule for any translation.The thesis holds that Wang Hongyin adopts the different translation strategies accordingto different translation purposes. Because being direct and concise is advocated in English, Wang Hongyin makes adjustments of lyrics text to adapt to the reading habit ofwestern receivers. To convey “exotic flavor” and its profound folk culture to westernreceivers, literal translation is used. In order to convey the appropriate meaning ofdialects in Northern Shaanxi folk songs to western receivers, liberal translation is adopted.Zero translation is adopted to translate some extra words in Northern Shaanxi folk songs.By translation strategies above, Wang Hongyin achieves his skopos of conveying theculture of Northern Shaanxi and showing an exotic atmosphere to western receivers.Besides the skopos rule, the thesis holds that Professor Wang hongyin follows coherencerule, by converting to target culture and target language conventions,which makes surethat western receivers can understand the target text. To makes sure that the target textcould be faithful to the source text as much as possible by the faithful imitation of dictionand the style of the source, the thesis holds that Professor Wang hongyin follows thefidelity rule.It is a new point of view to study the translation of Northern Shaanxi folk songsfrom the perspective of skopostheorie, which is of great importance in spreading folkculture of Northern Shaanxi to the western countries.