A Report On The Translation Of The Four Winds（Excerpt） Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This article is a report on the practice of English-Chinese translation which takes the contents of the first four chapters of an English novel The Four Winds as the translation material.This report uses Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory as the theoretical basis to analyze the application of translation strategies and techniques in the process of translating this novel.Written by the best-selling author Christine Hannah,set in the United States during the Great Depression of the 20th century,the novel mainly narrates an emotional story of love,family,and survival.At that time,Texas was plagued by years of drought and sandstorms,during which the protagonist,Elsa Walcott,grows from a faint-hearted little girl to a strong-willed woman.The environmental description of this novel is very realistic and vivid,and the words reveal the protagonist’s tenacious spirit.In the original text,the author included a number of expressions and descriptions related to that era,so how to translate them authentically and make the translated text intelligible is also a big challenge.Nida proposes that translation is the reproduction of the source language’s information in terms of meaning and style by using the most appropriate,natural and equivalent language.Translation does not seek rigid equivalence on the surface of the text,but rather functional equivalence between the two languages.This practice report includes task description,translation process,case study,post-translation reflection,etc.The application of functional equivalence theory in translation is analyzed from three aspects:vocabulary,syntax and rhetoric.At the lexical level,this report analyzes the translation of collocation,part of speech and polyseme,in which the functional equivalence is achieved through such techniques as amplification,conversion and diction.In terms of the syntax level,this report probes into the translation of passive sentence,complex sentence and word order in sentence,in which the functional equivalence is achieved through such ways as changing passive sentences into active ones,splitting long sentences into short ones,and inverting word order.In the aspect of rhetorical level,this report studies the translation of idiomatic phrase and simile,in which the functional equivalence is achieved through carefully selecting corresponding Chinese expressions.