摘要

圣乐（俗称赞美诗）在基督教历史中占据重要地位，它是继《圣经》后的另一基督教经典。通过圣乐的翻译，国内的信众及对英文不熟悉的国人方可领略其中的魅力。本文以功能翻译理论为基础（该理论将译者从对等理论中解放出来），结合歌曲翻译及圣乐翻译的相关研究，综合基督教的神学观，对基督教圣乐的翻译作相关探索，使读者能够更好地了解基督教圣乐翻译的合理性及可接受性，通过音乐了解基督教文化。

关键词:  圣乐翻译；功能主义；合理性；可接受性

Abstract

Hymns are of great importance in the history of Christianity, they are another classic works after the Bible. Through the hymn translation, the believers and Chinese people who are not acquainted with English could taste the flavor of hymns. This paper aims to make a tentative exploration on hymns, based on the functional translation theory, which liberates translators from the equivalence to the original text. And the writer also combines the relevant information of song translation, church music translation and Christian theological views, in order to enable readers to better understand the rationality and acceptability of the hymn translation.

Keywords: hymn translation; functionalism; rationality; acceptability

1.    Introduction 
It is well-known that western culture mainly stems from Christian culture. And the Christian culture includes two parts, that is the Holy Bible and hymns. Christianity is a music-oriented religion, so people can find great treasure in hymns.
1.1 Background knowledge
Hymns are one of the indispensible parts in the Christian literature. They are also regarded as great contribution after the Bible, another classic work of Christianity (Zhu Weizhi,1992). As Zhu Weizhi (1950) said in Rambling in Christian Literature in Forty Years, it is well-known that the Bible is a great treasure in the history of the world literature. Besides the Bible, hymns are at the second important place. On one hand, the contents of hymns should be lucid to understand, intelligent even to a senile woman; on the other hand, they should hold the poetic flavor so as not to be reduced to vulgarized doggerel. Tennyson, an English poet, believed hymns as a poetic style are hard to write.