The novel Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence has become a classic since its publication almost a century ago, and the past decades have seen a few of its new editions, which may be due to the growing interest of readers in psychoanalysis and gender studies. Meanwhile, the Chinese mainland and Taiwan have been assimilating for decades numerous aspects of western culture which might have been assimilating for decades numerous aspects of western culture which might have been taboos before. Among other things, Chinese translations of Sons and Lovers have been published and new translations of the novel have also appeared on either side of the Taiwan Strait in recent years. The present thesis, by comparing the English original of Sons and Lovers with four Chinese translations (including an abridged one), aims to study how these translations reflect the intentionality of parties involved, i.e. the author, the translators and/or the initiator/s, the acceptability and the adequacy of the target texts, and how the competence of the translators plays a part. In addition to the themes of this novel, as a framework for this study, the present writer has employed translation theories such as Hans Vermeer's skopos (intent), Eugene Nida's sociolinguistic approach, Lawrence Venuti's minoritisation and Gideon Toury's polysystem. A textual analysis divided into three sections is conducted on the four Chinese translations. The result shows that the translators' competence is of vital importance and the author's intentionality has to be understood. While the intent of the most powerful body or the initiator behind a translation is predominant in deciding to what extent and in which manner the original is translated, it is found that the Chinese translations under the present study have been made with consideration of their acceptability to meet the target market. In these translations, the grave omission of the novel's significant use of dialect is a case in point. It also confirms the observation that while appropriating the original, a translation gains its own identity. Keywords: acceptability, adequacy, competence, dialect, intentionality, minoritisation, norms, polysystem, remainder.