A Report On E-C Translation Of Pandemonium And Parade From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This report is on the basis of my transtion of the first Chapter Introduction to the Weird,of the book Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai.This chapter introduces how Japanese yokai discourse makes an impact on the social and historical research paradigm in modern Japan.Through displaying the roles played by Japanese yokai and the stories of them in various media between 17 th century and 20 th century,this chapter discusses the complex relationships between people’s beliefs of traditional culture and the cultural changes brought by commercialization.It reveals the interactions of people’s fears and happiness in daily life,the mixture of terrors and humors.The translation work is difficult and challenging because the original text involves many proper nouns based on Japanese culture and academic terminologies,which are mixed with literary elements.My strategy was to understand the English and then do the translation.To make the text fully comprehensible,I firstly decoded the large number of proper nouns and academic terminologies imbedded in the sentences and paragraphs through checking them in encyclopedia.Encyclopedia also provides me options of translating the target terms.The second step was to break the large number of long and complex sentences into simple and digestible ones,so the clarity of the original text can be guaranteed.The last step was to translate the paragraphs into Chinese sentence by sentence and rearrange the sentences to achieve the coherence and cohesion.This report is divided into five chapters.The first chapter introduces the background of this translation task.The second chapter discusses the functional equivalence theory and its application in translation.The third chapter is the main body of a textual analysis of the translation work of Chapter One Introduction to the Weird;it starts with analyzing the lexical features and syntactic features.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,the fourth chapter discusses the issues originated from vocabulary and syntax which I encountered during the translation and analyzes how the problems are solved via actual examples.The fifth chapter summarizes the contributions and limitations of this translation task and provides some suggestions from lexical and syntactic aspects for future research and translation works.Aiming at the problems in the translation process and combining with specific cases,the translator summarized the following solutions.At the lexical level,the proper nouns in the text are divided into culture-loaded words related to Japanese culture,compound words and folklore terms.The most proper translating methods for these terms are annotation,literal translation and transliteration with annotation.On the syntactic level,the translator discusses the translation of passive sentences and the treatment of complex sentences.For complex sentences,reorganization,division and adjustment of word order can be adopted.