A Report On The E-C Translation Of A Lady Of Quality (Excerpts)

This report is based on an E-C translation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel A Lady of Quality,which mainly tells the life experience of Clorinda Wildairs,the heroine of the story.When Clorinda is born,the odds seem stacked against her.Her father is an alcoholic and her mother dies in her childbirth.Despite this,Clorinda grows up to be a beautiful young girl with a sharp tongue and a will of iron.A Lady of Quality is a novel that shows the invincibility of the human spirit.As a woman,Clorinda refuses to be blindly submissive and accepts all her experiences,with the courage born of adversity.This novel has a lot of psychological activities,environment description and character dialogues,and the plot is full of twists and turns,both suspenseful and romantic,which make it awfully attractive.The translation of the source text will help satisfy the needs of the multitude,and enrich their cultural life.The translation is carried out under the guidance of Functional Equivalence Theory proposed by Eugene A.Nida,a prominent American linguist.Through the combination of theory and practice,typical cases are analyzed to explain how to solve problems during the translation process,which is conducted at lexical,syntactic,and textual levels.Moreover,the report manages to explore the guidance role of Functional Equivalence Theory in literary translation.And in the report,appropriate translation strategies and methods should be adopted to achieve functional equivalence between the source text and the target text so as to improve the quality of translation.Guided by Functional Equivalence Theory,the linguistic characteristics of the source text and the purpose of the translation are taken into consideration,and adaptation,conversion and free translation are adopted in terms of lexical translation.At the syntactic level,some translation methods such as recasting,omission and amplification,are properly used to make the translation more fluent and natural.When it comes to textual translation,the translator analyzes the context and employs certain strategies,including inversion,combination,and splitting,with the aim of conveying the information of the source text faithfully and accurately.Through the translation,the author has a further understanding of literary translation,and hopes that Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory can be more widely applied to the practice of literary translation in order to help the translated text achieve the desired effect.And if possible,it is hoped that the report can provide some references for the translation research of literary works and promote cultural exchange.