A Translation Report On Records Of Chengdu'S Streets And Alleys (Excerpt) From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

The project of Chinese Academic Translation has made a great process in the recent years,which means more and more Chinese cultural works have been marching toward the world.Ba-Shu Culture is both extensive and profound as well as having a long history root.In order to introduce the culture to more foreign readers,the School of Foreign Languages puts forward a translation plan of Records of Chengdu's Streets and Alleys which is written by Yuan Tingdong,a famous Ba-Shu Scholar and arranges it to the students.This report is the translator's record and conclusion of the translation project.The main type of original text is informative text.It is essential that the translated text should convey the content of the source text effectively.However,due to the differences in language habits between Chinese and English,the translated text must make some adjustments in form to conform to the habit of the target language.Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory emphasizes on the readers' response and focus on the natural equivalence of the source text's message,so the translator chooses this theory as the guiding theory of this translation practice.How to translate the source text into English under the precondition of achieving equivalence of informative function has become the biggest difficulty during translation.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,the translator mainly discusses the equivalence of informative function at lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.Besides,the translator chooses different translation methods when dealing with different translation objectives,proper nouns and complex sentence patterns.Through the translator's effort,the information of source text is well presented and the informative equivalence between the target text and the source text is basically achieved.Through this translation practice,the translator concludes that both the relative knowledge about language and corresponding knowledge of cultural background are required during the translation of cultural works,those are both the precondition of achieving the equivalence of text functions.At the same time,the writer also hopes that this report can provide references and thoughts of translation of works about Ba-Shu Culture's translation or correlational studies in the future.