A Study On The English Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In Desert Rites From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Desert Rites is created by Xue Mo,a national first-class writer in China,over a span of 12 years.For its overwhelming artistic appeal,it has been crowned with a great deal of accolades,such as "the Shanghai Grand Award for Excellent Novelettes and Novels",and "the Great Red Eagle Literature Award for Chinese Writers".In 2018,Desert Rites,a joint effort by the renowned American translator Howard Goldblatt and his wife Lin Lijun,was published and distributed in the US.However,it is not widely disseminated in the Chinese market,and thus few academics have researched it from the level of translation.Due to distinctness in Chinese and Western minds,the rendering of culture-loaded words in a great deal of Chinese literary works has made them incomprehensible,so it is pivotal to delve into excellent translations of Chinese literary works.With culture-loaded words in Desert Rites and its English translation by Howard Goldblatt as the target of study,this article analyzes them from the perspective of theory.Skopos theory argues that translation is a purposeful act,and methods and strategies in translation plays a decisive role.According to a wide variety of intents,translators resort to diverse translation methods and strategies to reflect the three rules of theory,so as to attain the demands of the text for the target language.From the perspective of Skopos theory,the author first analyzes how the culture-loaded words in Desert Rites reflect the three principles.Then the paper studies what strategies,methods and techniques employed in the process of translating Desert Rites are representative of the three rudimentary principles of Skopos theory.The study showed that in rendering the culture-loaded words in Desert Rites into English,the author’s translation of some eco-culture loaded words reflect the skopos rule,which expresses the author’s intention.Some religious cultural loaded words embody the fidelity rule,which helps readers learn about the unique traits of Chinese culture.Some language cultural loaded words embody the coherence rule and show the artistic charm.Moreover,the translators,guided by Skopos theory,mainly adopts two different translation strategies and six different translation methods.According to the demands of the cultural scene in novel,the translator mainly employs the domestication translation strategy to show the content,and the foreignization translation strategy to approach the target language reader’s native language level,to help them learn about the western cultural characteristics in the novel.Diverse translation strategies reflect the translator’s distinct cognition of Chinese culture in translation.At the same time,the author’s analysis found that literal translation and free translation were given priority while amplification,omissions,annotations,and transliteration were also demonstrated in the translation.Besides,it is also observed that,for the sake of making it easier for target readers to learn about the culture-loaded words in Desert Rites,the translators employed a proper combination of methods and strategies to illustrate various principles,affording translators in China lessons to learn from in literary translation in the future.