On Chinese-English Translation Of Peking Opera From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

China as an ancient nation with more than five thousand years of history gave birth to the brilliant Chinese civilization. Peking Opera as the excellent representative of the Chinese traditional operas and traditional culture, has been carrying and delivering the rich civilization. The basic connotation of Chinese culture, the most fundamental values of Chinese people have been vividly demonstrated in the classical repertoires like the worthy representative The Fisherman’s Revenge.Peking Opera belongs not only to the Chinese nation but also the whole world. Within the national context of the “introducing Chinese culture to the world” strategy, Peking Opera translation has become an crucial way to let the world understand China, Chinese culture and further to enhance China’s cultural soft power. Discussion ignoring reality is just castles in the air, and both the presence of many problems in the current overseas Peking Opera dissemination and the depression of the domestic studies on Peking Opera translation urge a fundamental solution to guide the Peking Opera translation. Peking Opera by its very nature belongs to the drama category, keeping the dual nature of literariness and performability, which makes the Peking Opera translation more complicated. The translation process involves not only the interlingual transfer of the two language symbol systems but also many other aspects, which requires the translator to side with only one of them. Therefore, to achieve the successful dissemination of Peking Opera overseas, we must get clear solutions to the following problems: What is the purpose of the English translation of Peking Opera presently? What is the theoretical guidance to the translation of Peking Opera? What is the standard of Peking Opera translation? What is the effective mode of Peking Opera dissemination? Once these problems are tackled, a practical and feasible theory system guiding the practice of the English translation of Peking Opera can be set up. According to the German Functionalist Theory of Translation, the translation purpose is the most important factor which guides the overall translation of producing a functionally adequate target text. The Skopos Theory provides a new theoretical perspective for the Peking Opera translation.Based on the Skopos Theory, this paper explores the problems above taking the two English versions of The Fisherman’s Revenge of the project “English Translation Series of a Hundred Peking Opera Classics” and Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang for example. The study finds that the translation of Peking Opera aims at spreading Chinese culture and stage performance is the most effective way to achieve this goal. Therefore, whether the translation is suitable for performance becomes the only standard to measure the Peking Opera translation, and intelligibility, individuality, colloquialism and the aesthetic value of Peking Opera are all vital to achieve this standard.