A Report On The Translation Of December Love (Excerpt) Guided By Functional Equivalence Theory

December Love,written in 1922 by an English writer Robert Smythe Hichens,is a romantic novel.The novel narrates an illustrious beauty who suffers from external humiliation and inner struggle when she gets old.In the novel,the phenomenon of familiar words generating unfamiliar meaning and culture-loaded words is quite common,and there are many complex long sentences transmitting with obscure information which need to be understood based on the context.English and Chinese from different language families have great differences,which make it difficult to understand in terms of diction,sentence structure and context information.In the course of the translation,the translator observes that the intention of preserving the linguistic form of the source text would fail to faithfully deliver the exact meaning in the original.This report takes Nida’s functional equivalence as the guiding theory,highlighting the transmission of meaning of the novel and the reading effect of readers without rigidly adhering to the linguistic form of the source text.When dealing with culture-loaded words,the translator tries to retain the cultural connotation of individual words in the source text,and employs the methods of literal translation,free translation and literal translation with annotation on the basis of considering the linguistic characteristics of the source text.In terms of long and complex sentences,the translator takes full account of the linguistic disparities between English and Chinese,flexibly adjusts the sentence pattern,and translates the original sentences into sentences in line with the way it is supposed to be put in Chinese.On the textual level,the translator attempts to interpret the text information on the basis of the overall context and ensures the logic and fluency between sentences and paragraphs.