| Translation, as a means of communication, is not only the substitution of one language for another, but the exchange between two different cultures. Terms of address are a cultural phenomenon as well as a linguistic one. Because of different traditional cultures and historical developments in the east and the west, Chinese and English kinship terms of address have formed their own national colors and linguistic features, which surely bring great difficulties to translation.With kinship terms of address in the first forty chapters of Hong Long Meng as the corpus, the thesis finds that Chinese kinship terms are different from English ones in the following three aspects: 1) high accuracy and complexity; 2) use of social terms of address among family members; 3) use of fictive kinship terms. Based on these disparities, with the great help of the software Wconcord, the thesis finds out Chinese kinship terms of address concerned and their corresponding terms in Yang's and Hawkes'versions. Then Yang and Hakwes'versions are compared and analyzed respectively in terms of meaning and style from the perspective of Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory. The study shows that Nida's functional equivalence provides great guidance for kinship terms of address translations. Referential meaning must be conveyed when accurate kinship terms of address such as"姨妈"and"三妹妹"are translated. When social terms of address used among family members and fictive kinship terms of address are rendered, pragmatic meaning must be conveyed. Besides, in translating kinship terms of address, one must also bear the style in mind. According to Register Theory, language styles vary with registers, which are composed of field, mode and tenor. Therefore, to achieve equivalence in style, one must take the following factors into consideration: the addressor, the addressee, the subject matter and the form of communication when kinship terms of address are translated. |
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