A Report On Translating Love For Lydia (Excerpt) Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This paper is a translation report based on the translation of Love for Lydia written by H.E.Bates,a famous English writer.The novel,focusing on young people’s suffering and growth in their pursuit of friendship and love,has a strong practical significance.At the same time,this work makes a vivid description of the environment and characters through unique words and exquisite sentences.Hence,choosing this novel as the translation material can help improve the translator’s literacy as well as her translation competence.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory proposed by Eugene A.Nida,the translator tries different and flexible methods to solve various translation difficulties caused by the author’s unique expressions and the differences between Chinese and English syntactic structures,with the aim of realizing functional equivalence between the original and the target text.At the lexical level,the translator attempts to convey accurately the meaning of the original by adopting the methods of conversion of parts of speech,amplification and extension of word meaning;at the syntactic level,division and inversion are utilized to make the target sentences idiomatic and smooth;at the textual level,methods of repetition and omission are employed in the target text to shift the expression habits of the original cohesive devices so that the target text is cohesive and conform to the Chinese way of speaking.The translator finds that to achieve functional equivalence between the target and the source text in translating Bates’s novel urges the translator to convey the original meaning accurately without losing the original style,and,as a result,the target-text readers could almost have the same aesthetic experience as the source-text readers.This paper discusses the solutions to the difficulties in the translation of Bates’s novel under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,offering some value for Chinese translation of Bates’s other novels to some extent.