Report On The Translation Of Chasing Chopin(Excerpt) From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

There is a growing need for translation of biographies.However,the development of translation in this field is hard to meet the demand of the market due to poor quality.To prove that Skopos theory could effectively improve the quality of biography translation,the author has translated a newly published biography of Chopin from English to Chinese based on the theory.The Skopos of the translation is to make its target readers,who are Chinese with little music background to understand the book as native readers do.Besides,the translator strives to create a reading atmosphere for readers by saving them from searching for background information which could have hindered their fluent reading.The report is expected to provide lessons for related translation.The case analysis is divided into three parts,namely,the guidance of three rules with different translation techniques to prove the effectiveness of Skopos theory in translating the biography.During the translation,the author encountered several problems.First,the book involves a great number of terminologies of music which could puzzle target readers who may also lack necessary history knowledge about the events in Chopin’s times.The author tackled the problem by using footnote adding.The difficult point is that footnotes cannot be lengthy but they must make target readers have a basic understanding of those specific events.Second,the author employed both free translation and literal translation to guarantee the balance between faithfulness and readability.After a careful analysis of 20 examples,the author drew a conclusion that the theory could markedly improve the quality of translation through the methods such as sentence reorganization,division and domestication.