A Study Of The English Translation From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Among many excerpted English translation versions of Three Kingdoms, there are only two complete translation versions, one was translated by C. H. Brewitt Taylor at the beginning of twentieth Century, first published in 1925, the other one was done by Moss Roberts in the 1980s, and first published in 1992. He translated Three Kingdoms for at least two reasons, one is to introduce Chinese culture and the legends of heroes in the era of war, the second reason is to show the beauty of Chinese language to the western readers. Scholars at home and abroad pay a lot of attention to the translation version when it came out.We hold the view that Skopostheorie guide the judge of the translation version of a literary work well. Guided by the skopostheorie, this paper is in an attempt to undertake the systematical analysis of Moss Roberts'Three Kingdoms translation version from three levels:words, sentence and culture.We have found that:(1) Moss Roberts had a clear purpose. His translation strategies and methods used in the translation of words and sentences must be determined by the purposes of his translation.(2) The translation strategies of literal translation, free translation, literal translation plus annotation are mostly used in the translation, we need to keep the balance of the fidelity and coherence principle, we can use literal translation plus annotation methods to deal with the vocabulary which are not easy to understand by readers, and translator is required to grasp the expected translation purposes.(3) When translation with culture of color words is not equal to target language, especially for Chinese Polysemy which appears frequently, we can have explanatory notes. It requires the translator to explain with the appropriate words based on the correct understanding of the source text, otherwise it will go against coherence principle and affect the understanding of translation.