Equivalent Reproduction Of Characters In Boy, Snow, Bird In The Chinese Version

Currently, the subjects on literature translation are mostly focused on the classical works,masterpieces of literary masters or works of Nobel Prize winners. The modern new talentedpersons of letters and their works are not attached much importance. This article concentrateson one of the most outstanding English writers today, Helen Oyeyemi, and her fifth novel Boy,Snow, Bird,which, by transforming Snow White into a tale that hinges on race and culturalideas about beauty,explores powerful themes, such as self-perception, race relations, identity,race and family, arguing in brilliant language that black, white, good, evil, beauty andmonstrosity are different sides of a single, awesome truth.This report is based on the translation practice of some chapters in part one of this novel.These chapters are the most important and fantastic parts of the whole book, which give thebasic clues of the story and contain a lot of splendid portraits of appearance, behavior andmentality about the characters. Character is one of the core factors in fictions. The literaryfigures in a good fiction usually are vivid and distinctive. In the translation of fiction, thetranslator should fully understand the literal meaning of words, more importantly, the truemeaning and spirit the source-text conveys, thus an equivalent character can be presented inthe target language, the literary value, significance and aesthetic effect of the source-textbeing reflected in the target-text.Based on the functionalism put forward by Christine Reiss and the translation practice ofBoy, Snow, Bird from English to Chinese, this article focuses on reporting the following threeaspects: how and by what translation strategies the portrait of appearance, behavior andmentality have been transferred into Chinese from English; difficulties the translator has evermet during the process of translating and the solutions; the case study exemplifying thereproduction of the characters in the novel, which tries to prove to be consistent with the ideal effect in translation: searching for the most possibility of natural equivalence between thetwo languages.