A Functional Equivalence Approach To The Translation Strategies Of Discourse Markers In The Return Of Sherlock Holmes

Although the discourse marker does not constitute the content of the discourse,it is essential for the utterance expression and the hearer's understanding;in particular,under two different circumstances of two languages,how to get the accurate interpretation of the same discourse marker for different circumstances is of vital importance.It is found that there are few researches on The Return of Sherlock Holmes from the perspective of functional equivalence.Nida's functional equivalence theory puts emphasis on "readers'responses",that is,the readers in the target language should have the same response with that in the original language.This paper carries out the statistic analysis of the different kinds of discourse markers' strategies in The Return of Sherlock Holmes on the basis of the functional equivalence theory and the corpus of The Return of Sherlock Holmes and its Chinese version.The results of the analysis show that there are so many kinds of discourse markers in The Return of Sherlock Holmes,and they can be divided as follows:conjunction,pronoun,adverb,interjection,phrases and short sentences.When translating these discourse markers,the translator mainly takes four strategies:literal translation,addition,deletion and alteration.The translator approaches the same discourse marker under different circumstances and the different discourse markers in different circumstances with different strategies,thus making the target language gain the closest equivalence to the original language and at the same time enabling the reader in the target language to have the same response with that in the original language.Therefore,it can be said that the functional equivalence theory plays an important role in the translation of the discourse markers.