A Practical Report On Translation Of Novels Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

With the development of globalization and the call of Chinese culture “going global,” the translation of literary works has been playing a positive role in promoting the cultural exchange and development among China and other countries.Novel,as a typical product of literature,is rich in plots and wonderful character portrayals.It has been a deep attraction for the majority of readers.The novel,Troubles of Life,has started the new realism novel genre and has occupied an important position in the history of contemporary Chinese literature.It is also a piece of outstanding representative work of Chi Li.Therefore,translating it into accurate and idiomatic English will contribute to a better understanding of Chinese outstanding contemporary culture for the western readers.This practical report is based on the translation of Troubles of Life(excerpts),which contains about 20,000 words.The source text vividly spreads out a scroll about the trivial and life scenes of people who live in Wuhan,and there are many psychological descriptions,action descriptions and dialogues among characters in this text.Thus,how to translate them into idiomatic English has become a major headache.Nida’ s Functional Equivalence Theory is applied to guide the translation task and is used to analyze typical cases of the work as well as discuss translation strategies used in translation,such as domestication and foreignization,and the translation skills used in the translation process are meanwhile summarized with specific examples,including literal translation with annotation,free translation,conversion and so on so forth.The application of these strategies and skills is aimed at helping to translate the original text more smoothly and reproduce the style of the original text as much as possible on the basis of theoretical guidance so as to achieve the overall functional equivalence.In the specific translation process,at lexical level,the translation text requires to be idiomatic,which involves the translation of Wuhan dialect and quadrisyllable words.At syntactic level,the language should be fluent and conform to the logic of the target language.At textual level,it is necessary to ensure the cohesion and coherence of the discourse,while retaining the writer’s writing style.This novel has certain translation value.Through this translation practice,the following conclusions can be drawn: The characteristics of new realistic novels determine that the firstA Practical Report on Translation of Novel Under the Guidance of Functional Equivalence Theory: Taking C-E Translation ofChi Li’ s Troubles of Life(Excerpts)as an Example problem that translators need to solve is to translate the source language into the closest natural equivalent and make the target language readers get a reading experience similar to that of the original language readers.More importantly,the author of this report applies Functional Equivalence Theory to guide the translation of Chi Li’s novel in order to provide some reference for other novel translators and promote Chi Li’s literature works to be displayed in English and it is also significant to further promote the outgoing of outstanding Chinese works.