A Translation Report On Chapter 4 Of Milton And The Spiritual Reader:Reading And Religion In Seventeenth-Century England

This thesis is a translation practice report.The translation material is extracted from the book Milton and the Spiritual Reader:Reading and Religion in 17th Century England by Professor David Ainsworth.The book was published in May 2008 and there is no Chinese translation of the book at present.Professor David Ainsworth has made great achievements in the study of literature in the 17th century,especially in Milton’s works.The book he wrote has made an important contribution to the understanding of religious ideas in Milton’s prose and poetry,and has also provided the readers with effective basis and ideas for reading and interpreting Milton from the spiritual perspective.David Ainsworth’s research also makes readers reconsider the basic relationship between reading and religion in England in the 17th century.He argues that spiritual reading can be practiced as a form of critical reading.It is convincingly demonstrated by presenting this kind of reading to the readers.This literary work provides a spiritual guidance for readers of Milton and a new reading form for readers of other literary works.This is an important reason why the translator chose this work as the translation material.This work is a literary criticism text and contains many religious cultural thoughts,which requires the translator to read extensively and deeply understand the books and cultural knowledge related to the work.Chapter four of this book selected by the translator mainly introduces the interpretation and reading of Paradise Lost from the spiritual perspective.By demonstrating his own spiritual reading model,the author leads the readers through a similar effort,so as to better understand and read Milton’s other works.In order to better express the content and form of the original text,the translator chose Eugene A.Nida’s functional equivalence theory to guide the translation practice.And during the translation process,which will be analyzed in terms of meaning,style and culture,the source language is translated into the target language according to Nida’s three procedures of "analysis","transfer" and "restructuring" in hope of realizing the functional equivalence as far as possible according to the style and characteristics of the work,so that the target language readers can accurately understand the information to be expressed by the original author,thus providing guidance for their literary reading.