A Report On The Translation Of The Novel The Other Family Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Loretta Nyhan is an excellent Amazon bestseller writer.Most of her works describe how women get through life’s difficulties from a unique female perspective,showing the charm of women.Most of her works are positive and touching.The Other Family tells a story about motherhood,courage,and the truth of family.The author creates vivid characters with delicate and touching strokes,which is an inspiring humorous novel.Meanwhile,the novel also involves the contents of medicine,psychology and other fields,which has high artistic value and translation value.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,this report is based on the translation practice of the Other Family.This theory emphasizes the transmission of information and readers’ feelings,which is of great significance to novel translation.Applying the corresponding translation strategies and methods of this theory can effectively help the translator understand and grasp the context of the original text.It also helps to transform a large number of psychological descriptions,action descriptions and oral expressions in the original text into accurate and appropriate Chinese,which could solve the problem of the conversion between the two languages.This report first gives a brief overview of the background and development of functional equivalence theory.Guided by this theory,it analyzes the difficulties and problems in the translation process from the three levels of lexis,syntax,and text with examples.Firstly,the original text is mainly composed of story narration and character dialogue.In the dialogue part,the words are simple and colloquial.It is difficult to translate it authentically.Secondly,the narrative part of the story is mainly the psychological description of the characters.The author is good at using adjectives to accurately describe the mood of the characters,which is also difficult to make the translated descriptions fit the characters.Finally,the third difficulty in translation is to reproduce the content of the original text,convey the author’s intention and reproduce the artistic style of the original text.Through the translation of this novel,the translator strives to bring positive influence to the young readers in China and provide reference for them to establish a correct world outlook.