A Study On C-E Translation Of Museum Interpretive Texts From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

China has become an attractive and important destination for international visitors to learn about its long history, profound culture and unique customs. Visiting museums is an easy and effective channel for them to understand and appreciate Chinese cultural relics. As an integral part of museum, museum interpretive texts can offer abundant and useful background information of cultural relics for visitors from home and abroad. However, researches find that Chinese interpretive texts offered by museums can only be understood by domestic visitors and fail to meet international visitors’ expectation to learn Chinese culture; furthermore, a number of English interpretive texts are translated word for word in museums, which may easily cause international visitors’ misunderstandings of cultural relics. Therefore, it’s necessary to conduct a study on C-E translation of museum interpretive texts.As a research paper, this paper reviews domestic scholars’ previous researches on C-E translation of museum interpretive texts first and selects Skopos Theory as the theoretical framework. On the basis of author’s translation practice, this paper selects English interpretive texts from Shaanxi History Museum, Capital Museum, Tang West Market Museum and Highlights of Huaqing Palace Relics as study objects and further analyzes the features of English museum interpretive texts at lexical level, syntactic level, rhetorical level and discoursal level. Under the guidance of Skopos Theory, this paper adopts three rules to guide C-E translation of museum interpretive texts and provide three specific translation approaches. The significance of this paper lies in providing three specific translation approaches, namely transliteration plus annotation, simplification and paraphrasing, which provides a reference for translators on C-E translation of museum interpretive texts.