A Practice Report On The Translation Of Ricoeur,Literature And Imagination From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This practice report is based on the translation of the fourth chapter of the philosophic book Ricoeur,Literature and Imagination.The source text explores how the conflict between literature and literary theory has affected Ricoeur’s imagination and understanding theories,and how Ricoeur’s unique way of reflection resolves the conflict in the heyday of literary theory,pointing out a new direction for literary research.In order to help the target readers to achieve the same reading effects as the readers of the source text,this translation practice focuses on solving the problem of readability of the translation.The source text contains complex philosophic background knowledge,thus it undoubtedly poses a great challenge to the translator’s thorough understanding of it.What’s more,the translator needs to put the ideas of the source text into a language of which the surface structure bears great difference from that of the source language,which makes this translation practice even more challenging.Nida’s functional equivalence theory and Chomskey’s transformational generative grammar have provided effective theory guidance for this practice.Long complex sentences have been a great feature of the language in philosophical works,which is intended to express strict logic as well as profound ideas.Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar is of great help for analyzing the internal syntactic structure of long complex sentences and converting it into the appropriate surface structure in the target language.Nida’s functional equivalence theory serves as an effective theoretical guidance for this translation practice.In Nida’s view,translation is not just the equivalence of words,but the equivalence of meaning.The meaning here includes semantic and linguistic style,not only the translation of superficial vocabulary information,but also the conveyance of deeper information and logic.Based on functional equivalence theory,the translator avoids seeking only the word-to-word translation of the original text during the translation process,but strives to fully and clearly present the ideas in target language and make the translationconform to the writing style of the target language so as to achieve satisfying readability.In dealing with the abstract philosophic concepts that appear in the source text,the translator uses the method of annotation to perform the necessary interpretation combined with transliteration to make it easy to understand.