| This report is based on the Chinese-English translation of a short story That Kind of Person.Written by the contemporary writer Su Tong in 1996,this short story was included in Su Tong’s short story collection,which belongs to the serious literature category.Considering the personal reading interests and practical requirements,the author of the report(hereinafter referred as AR)chooses the work as the translation material and is responsible for translating and the first review,a total of about 12,000 words.Eugene.A.Nida,a renowned American translation theorist,proposes the concept of“functional equivalence” and emphasizes that translation is to reproduce in the receptor language the closest,natural equivalent of the source language message in terms of meaning and style.At present,plenty of translation practices in China have borrowed this theory as a guide to explore how to achieve functional equivalence from lexical,syntactical and textual level.Mainly focusing on how to achieve functional equivalence at the linguistic level,these kinds of studies pay little attention to the literary and cultural level.Therefore,this thesis intends to complete the translation task from the perspective of functional equivalence theory,and discusses how to achieve linguistic,literary and cultural equivalence to the maximum extent in the process of English translation of short stories.In this report,the AR firstly introduces the translation task,the source text as well as the significance of the translation task.Then the source text,difficulties in translation,target readers of the translation task are analyzed respectively.After introducing Nida’s functional equivalence theory,the AR further discusses its guiding role in the translation of short stories.Based on the theoretical perspective of functional equivalence,the AR chooses cases from the target text which correspond to linguistic,literary and cultural level respectively.Based on the cases,the AR carries out value judgment of the translation through comparative analysis in an endeavor to explore what translation strategies and methods the translator can use to maximize the functional equivalence of the source text and the target text at the abovementioned three levels.Finally,the AR finds that it is possible for the translators to achieve functional equivalence at linguistic,literary and cultural levels through adjusting their translation strategies and methods when translating short stories.And the specific adjustments are as follows:(1)The lexical equivalence can be achieved by adding quotation mark and the syntactic equivalence can be achieved by employing addition.(2)Functional equivalence is possible to be achieved when literal translation is adopted in translating environmental description and character description;or when liberal translation is used in translating dialogue description and psychological description.(3)Functional equivalence is possible to be achieved when addition is used or annotation outside the text is added in translating cultureloaded materials and cultural allusions. |
