A Translation Report Of The Garrets And Pretenders:A History Of Bohemianism In America (Excerpts) Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

The translation material of this report is taken from Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America by Albert Parry,a Russian scholar and historian.The translator chooses chapters 26-27 of the book as source material for English-Chinese translation study.The selected chapters describe the life stories of Bohemians represented by Bob Clairmont,Ezra Pound in America and Europe,reflecting the prosperity of Bohemian cultural circle and changes of Bohemian culture after World War I.Featuring the factuality and literariness simultaneously,the source text can be categorized into biography.As a result,the translator chooses Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory as the guiding theory for this translation report.Nida’s functional equivalence theory requires that the translation should reproduce the information covered by the source language in an appropriate and natural way.By that way,target readers can obtain the similar reading experiences as original readers,which realizes content equivalence.In addition to content equivalence,Nida also emphasizes that the target text ought to achieve the “linguistic function” of the source language by restructuring the target language.The translators are required to pay attention to both the content equivalence and formal equivalence during translation.In this report,the translator firstly gives a brief description of the translation task,after collecting and analyzing the background information of the source text.The translator presents the translation process including pre-translation,during translation and post-translation.Then,the translator analyzes the application of Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory in this report.To verify that,the translator selects typical cases from Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America according to three levels.Those are lexical level,rhetorical level and textual level respectively.In order to reach the functional equivalence at lexical level,the translator applies some techniques such as trasliteration,literal translation,complementary translation and liberal translation in the text to convey the information of the source language,so that the target language readers can enjoy the same reading experience as the source language readers.In order to reach the functional equivalence in rhetorical level,the translator makes comprehensive use of chinese rhetorical techniques to embody the rhetorical feature of the source text.In order to reach the functional equivalence in textual level,the translator,by means of omission and logical reorganization,can get rid of the shackles of English sentence structure and makes the translation conform to Chinese expression habits,so as to avoid the translationese.Beyond that,the translator tries to feel the language style and probe into charaters’ psychology in original text,keeping the language style of the target text in accordance with the original text and picturing the character image.At the end of this report,the translator summarizes the shortcomings and experience presented in the translation practice.Finally,the translator hopes that English-Chinese translation techniques applied to biographical literature can be concluded for other translators dealing with similar texts.