A Study Of Vulgar Language Translation In Outlaws Of The Marsh From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

Although vulgar language is regarded as impolite and aggressive, it indeed exists in various languages and cultures. Vulgar language is a normal linguistic phenomenon. People use it to express their most direct and truest feelings. When people feel sad, angry or despair, they always speak dirty words. However, the application of vulgar language violates the politeness principle, so in many cases it is usually considered a taboo both on linguistic level and social level. Although the study of vulgar language is prohibited during the long period of Chinese history, it doesn’t mean that the importance of studying vulgar language could be ignored. Nowadays, it’s of great importance for every translator to study how to translate vulgar language and the cultural information contained in it.As two translation strategies, domestication and foreignization has always been the focus of translators, especially in literary translation. It’s controversial whether domestication or foreignization is proper for the translation of literary works. Domestication concentrates on target language readers’understanding of the text, while foreignization focuses on the expression of the culture and information of the original language. This article will introduce the basic theories of these two translation strategies as well as their representatives. The author will further introduce the development process of these two translation strategies both in China and Western countries.This article is directed by Skopostheorie, and analyzes which translation strategy should be adopted with certain skopos. At the present stage, lots of scholars tend to find a better translation strategy between domestication and foreignization, while they don’t have a proper guiding theory. Under the circumstance, the functional translation theory, especially skopostheorie should be adopted to solve the problem. The appearance of skopostheorie provides a new perspective for translation practice. This article will introduce skopostheorie from four parts:historical overview, basic notions and rules, as well as the practical application of skopostheorie to the choice of translation strategy.Shui Hu Zhuan is the epic masterpiece of Chinese literature history. It’s the first traditional serial novel in refined vernacular language in Chinese history and has been translated into lots of languages. This article selected the translation of vulgar language in Outlaws of the Marsh of Shapiro as research object. The article takes the skopostheorie as its guiding theory and research perspective, and the methodology of it is qualitative research. From the research of Outlaws of the Marsh, the author found out that:(1) The vulgar language in Shui Hu Zhuan is translatable in many cases; (2) sometimes the vulgarism in Chinese may have no corresponding translation version in English. It needs the translators to adopt flexible translation method to solve those problems, not only to translate them literally; (3) Shapiro mainly adopts four translation method:domestication, foreignization, combination of domestication and foreignization as well as omission. Domestication and foreignization are not absolutely opposite to each other, but exist side by side and play a part together; (4) the choice of a certain translation strategy is determined by the specific skopos.The article consists of six chapters. Chapter One introduces the background, motivation, purpose, methodology as well as research questions. Chapter Two introduces vulgarism, then the author makes a literature review of the translation of vulgarsim and Shui Hu Zhuan. Chapter Three introduces the Skopostheorie. Chapter Four analyzes the translation of vulgarism in Outlaws of the Marsh in depth. Chapter Five discusses translation strategy for vulgar language in Shui Hu Zhuan. It introduces domestication and foreignization briefly and summarizes the translation strategies adopted by Shapiro in Outlaws of the Marsh. The conclusion of the whole thesis is drawn in Chapter Six. In this chapter, research findings, limitations and expectations for future study have been listed.