A Study On Textless Back Translation Of China-themed English Works From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Textless back translation here refers to the kind of back translation in which the translator retranslates China-themed works written in the English language back into the Chinese language.The textless back translation of China-themed works written in English language has attracted much attention in recent years because of its hybridity of linguistic and cultural,which has caused scholars to compare it with the traditional translation works and have a deeper reflection.This thesis takes Skopos Theory as the theoretical basis.Research methods such as literature research,quantitative research,case research,and comparative research are used.The literary work Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper by the non-Chinese foreign writer Fuchsia Dunlop and the Chinese version translated by He Yujia are the research objects.According to Nida’s theory of Chinese culture-specific items,the materials are collected from the English version of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper.A total of 272 materials were collected in this study.These materials involved dialect culture,cooking culture and political culture,poetry and historical allusions in traditional culture.Also,this paper makes a systematic analysis of the selected corpus from the perspective of the characteristics of culture-specific items and the differences between Chinese and Western cultures,studies the translation methods and techniques used by the corpus in textless back translation.By summarizing the frequency of various translation methods and techniques that appear in the corpus,the data are finally derived to corroborate what differences there are between the textless back translation and the translation.The research found that:First of all,containing a large number of special cultural items with Chinese characteristic is the most typical feature of China-themed works written in English.Secondly,the characteristic of textless back translation is that the problem of the expressiveness of language to culture is more prominent.Finally,among the translation methods and techniques embodied in the text through the research,free translation,addition and literal translation are the mainstream of textless back translations of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper,while the translation methods of adaption and combination are not common.According to the data collected from the materials and the analysis and statistics of the translation methods,the translation methods such as literal translation,free translation,and omission will be adopted in the process of the textless back translation,but the usage frequency of different translation methods is different.Compared with translation,the translation method of omission is more used in textless back translation,so as to omit the annotation of words with Chinese characteristics in foreign language writing.Therefore,in the practice of textless back translation,the translator should comprehensively use appropriate translation methods according to the characteristics of the language and culture itself and the analysis of the original intention to achieve the purpose of translation.