Comments On English Version Of Chinese Suzhou Gardens From Perspective Of Skopos Theory

In recent years,garden design in China is more and more keen to imitate the West.As a treasure of Chinese culture,Chinese classical gardens are gradually fading out of people’s sight,let alone going to the world.In view of this situation,this thesis aims to make more people in the world understand and reevaluate traditional Chinese garden art and appreciate the beauty of traditional Chinese culture and art by analyzing the high-quality English translation of Suzhou Gardens.Based on Skopos theory,this thesis first introduces three rules of Skopos Theory:skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule,and expounds the feasibility of Skopos Theory to the English translation of Chinese garden texts.On this basis,through the detailed comparison and study of the Chinese version of Suzhou Gardens written by Chen Congzhou and the English version translated by Zhu Wenjun and Chen Wei,it is found that the Chinese and English versions are both excellent and make a perfect pair.The originality of the Chinese version of Suzhou Gardens is that it introduces the philosophy of garden design to the readers with its unique language style,but it does not make the readers feel boring or troubled by unfamiliar terms.The English version basically retains the same language style as the original.Language difficulties in the original text,such as a large number of four-character words,complex run-on sentences,freehand brushwork style,historical and cultural information,garden terms and others,are well handled in the translation.Translation skills are embodied in:(1)the appropriacy of wording,that is the accurate translation of four-character words and complex run-on sentences in the original text through the word meaning concretization and sentence hypotactic devices;(2)the artistry of difficulty processing,that is the flexible translation of historical and cultural information etc.in the original text through information supplement and discourse rephrase;(3)equivalency of text effect,that is the information transmission equivalence,beauty delivery equivalence and emotion expression equivalence between the two texts through various accuracy and artistry processing,.At the end of this thesis,some improvement suggestions are put forward for the accuracy of scenic spot names and the specialty of garden terms in the translation.Suzhou Gardens contains all the basic features of Chinese classical garden art.Through the analysis of its English translation,the author hopes to provide useful help for relevant gardening text translators in the future,afford effective reference for the study of garden text translation,and also make the world interested in Chinese classical garden and promote Chinese classical garden to the world.