A Study On The Translation Of Chen Ai Luo Ding From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Chen Ai Luo Ding, written by Tibetan writer A Lai, won the Mao Dun Literature Award in 1998 in spite of many difficulties. From the perspective of an idiot-- the second master, the novel describes the Tibetan customs and ups and downs of chieftain system at the turn of historical period, and it is evaluated as one of the most valuable works among all the Mao Dun Literature works. The English version-- Red Poppies: A Novel of Tibet is translated by a famous American sinologist-- Howard Goldblatt in collaboration with his wife Sylvia Li-chun Lin. After its publication by the Mifflin Company in 2002, it gets its popularity among a large quantity of readers.Yet, the study of this English version in China is comparatively limited due to short of the foreign publication in China. In addition, most of the existent research is made in such perspectives as Tibetan culture, text itself and translators rather than from that of the readers’ response. Therefore, this thesis aims to study the translation of Chen Ai Luo Ding from the perspective of readers’ response based on Nida’s functional equivalence theory.Nida’s functional equivalence theory has exerted great influence on the studies on translation research at home and abroad. With more attention being paid to the relationship between text and readers, Nida puts forth the translation rules based on readers’ response and assumes that the optimal translation could reach the same response between readers of the translated work and readers of the original work,which has a strong guiding meaning on literary translation. Therefore, this thesis attempts to make an analysis on the translation of Chen Ai Luo Ding from the perspective of functional equivalence theory.The actual analysis of the translated version is made from three aspects--meaning, style and culture so as to find different degrees of equivalence. In terms of meaning, equivalence has been achieved on the lexical, rhetorical and syntactic level.In terms of style, an analysis has been made from the humor and irony and soundequivalence. In terms of culture, different equivalence has been achieved from five kinds of culture-- religious culture, social culture, ecological culture, material culture and linguistic culture. In the process of translation, the translators mainly use the domestication to delete the original images to a suitable degree to approach the target readers. It should be noted that domestication is frequently adopted to deal with cultural information. Considering culture, the Tibetan culture is regarded as part of Chinese minority groups’ culture, distinct from American culture largely and translators may adopt the domestication to reduce the target readers’ strangeness to the translated text according to the people’s similar response to some similar things,the similarity between original text and target text and readers’ acceptability and ability to understand in their daily life.