A Report On The Translation Of Language In Literature From The Perspective Of Functional Approach To Translation

This report is a summary of the Chinese translation of three essays written by Roman Jakobson.These essays,collected in the book Language in literature,contain his ideas on language,translation and poetics.As Roman Jakobson has been regarded as a leading representative of structural linguistics that thrived at the beginning of the twentieth century.the ideas expressed in the three essays are worthy of introduction for those devoted to the studies of linguistics and literary theony.The essays abound with academic terms,and sentences in these papers usually contain various layers of modifiers and flexible structures.To translate them is undoubtedly no easy task.Thus,reflections on the translation process could be of some help to future translators in handling similar types of materials.The Introduction provides a brief sunmmary of the studies on the translation of academic writings,the type of text to which the three essays belong.It concludes that the translation of academic writings could be improved and thus still deserves to be discussed.The plan of this report is,therefore,to analyze the Chinese translation of the essays from functional approach to translation.Chapter One of the report provides necessary background information,mainly including the research areas and contributions of Roman Jakobson,a brief summary of Language in Literature and the main ideas presented in the three essays.Chapter Two clarifies the specific challenges encountered in the translation process,largely posed by technical terms and complex sentence structures.Chapter Three elaborates the functional approach to translation,that is,the perspective adopted in the examination of the Chinese translation of the three essays,and particularly the"Skopos theory"and the"text typology".The apparent inconsistency between the two approaches is discussed at the end of this chapter Chapter Four proceeds to examine carefully the Chinese translation of the three essays at the levels of words,sentences and paragraphs from the functional perspective.The translation of people's names,academic terms and literary expressions at the word level,the handling of modifiers and sentence orders at the sentence level and the question of ensuring cohesion at the paragraph level are discussed one by one.Moreover,specific translation strategies are summarized after the analysis of each case.The Conclusion summarizes the report,pointing out that the functional approach to translation is instructive,and the Chinese translation of the three essays has followed the three principles of the Skopos theory and the suggestions offered by the text typology.Moreover,several practical suggestions for the translation of academic writings are given.It is hoped that readers who are interested in the theories developed by Roman Jakobson and future translators who deal with similar text could get some useful information from this report.