A Report On The E-C Translation Of How Beautiful We Were (Excerpt)

The year 2023 marks the 67 th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between China and Africa,and the two countries will build a closer community of shared future.How Beautiful We Were,written by an emerging African-American writer Imbolo Mbue,is a novel describing the oil issue in Africa.The translation of this book can help readers appreciate the charm of different cultures,deepen their understanding of Africa,and at the same time,enrich the research in the field of literature,providing more material for scholars committed to the translation of novels.This paper takes Nida’s functional equivalence theory as the theoretical guidance.According to Nida,a good translation should convey not only the information but also the spirit and style of the original work with smooth language that conforms to the norms and conventions of the target language,and readers of the source and target text should have similar reactions.The novel translation is analyzed from lexical,syntactic,discoursal and stylistic levels.At the lexical level,the writer adopts strategies of four-character expression and conversion according to the context,improving the literariness of the work and conforming to the expression habits of Chinese.At the syntactic level,the writer converts some indirect quotations into direct quotations to highlight the character’s subjectivity.As for some complex sentences,the translator adopts the division strategy,splitting some components from the sentence and adding some words to translate separately,making the translation clear and logical.At the discoursal level,the writer mainly focuses on the translation of personal pronouns and uses the methods of repetition,reduction and omission to ensure that the translation is authentic.At the stylistic level,the writer pays attention to rhetoric.It is found that functional equivalence theory is compatible with the demands of novel translation and has a broad range of applications when translating literary texts.It is a valuable reference for the translation of literary works and offers a fresh viewpoint for literature research.