A Study Of The Chinese Versions Of "Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland"

This study explores the realization of functional equivalence in the translation of children’sliterature through a comparative analysis of two Chinese versions of Alice’s Adventures inWonderland.Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has won readers’ high appreciation in the world, and ithas been translated into many languages. The number of its versions is only smaller than that ofShakespeare’s works. In this book, Carroll uses much children’s language, nursery rhyme andrhetoric especially puns to enhance the mysterious fantasy and witty humor. However, thesecontents enjoyed by English young readers aren’t familiar to their counterparts in China. So torender these literary specialties equivalently is crucial to the success of their translations. In thestudies made so far, researchers mostly paid attention to the meaning of the words and sentences,but the rhetoric, nursery rhyme and culture-bound items are ignored. The paper explores thewords while strengthening the research of the rhetoric and culture-bound items to supplement thestudy.Among many versions, Zhao Yuanren’s translation is very popular among the readers, andgives much enlightenment to later translators. Another popular version is Li Hanzhao’stranslation in2007. In the background of international communication, he has differenttranslation process and methods. And in the studies made so far, researchers mostly analyzedonly one version, or analyzed several versions from the perspective of Skopos’ theory. This studyadopts the way of qualitative analysis to compare Zhao Yuanren’s translation and Li Hanzhao’stranslation. The study wants to compare the two versions to find out if they have achievedfunctional equivalence and the way in which they achieved.Below are the findings: Firstly, the two Chinese translations have achieved functionalequivalence at different levels. ZhaoYuanren’s translation, even it is older, but it is done better infunctional equivalence, which is worth to being a reference. The imbalance of functionalequivalence is not only due to the translator has not fully comprehended the original meaning butalso is satisfied with formal equivalence rather than functional equivalence, and the translatorfails to recognize children’s mentality in some cases. The unawareness of children’s dispositioncaused the imbalance of functional equivalence. Secondly, functional equivalence theoryprovides theoretical guidance for translators to choose words, rhetoric devices and the way ofdealing with cultural differences. Finally, as the cultural equivalence is concerned, translatorsshould adopt domestication as the primary strategy and foreignization as the supplementary.This study bears theoretical significance in that it tests the validity of functional equivalencein the field of children’s literature through contrastive analysis of the two Chinese versions. In terms of its practical significance, the study tries to summarize suggestions and proposals totranslators of children’s literature, based on the distinctive features of literary works for youngreaders.