Abstract: With the delimitation of sports texts under the guidance of Holmes' translatology framework, and the clarification of types and functions of sports texts based on studies of text typology by Reiss, Newmark and scholars at home, the paper explores how to use linguistic theories of translation to conduct sports English translation. The findings are: 1. Sports texts mainly cover the fields of sports news, sports education, sports marketing, sports performance, sports intelligence and sports literature; 2. Catford's (Syntactic School ) emphasis on translation equivalence, Nida's (Semantic School) stress on meaning transfer and communication in translation and Gutt's (Pragmatic School )focus on sound relevance selection and context replication during the process of translation all provide effective guidance to sports translation. The three schools are mutually complementary; 3. Linguistic theories of translation are helpful in defining sports texts and their types as well as functions so that adaptive strategies and methods can be developed in lexical, syntactic, discourse and rhetoric levels for sound translation.

Key words: linguistic theories of translation, sports English translation, text types, text functions, Sports text