Dynamic Equivalence In Translating Proverbs

Proverbs are the glittering gems of the cultural treasure house in the world. Onthe whole, they are deep in meaning and rich in rhyme. Moreover, they are not only the carriers of intelligence and wisdom of the people but also the reflections of the languages and the arts. From the perspective of their content, proverbs are all the collective wisdom of peoples, distilled from centuries of experience of dealing with the problems and difficulties of life. On the other hand, their popularity has also been enhanced by the use of such devices as rhyme, assonance, alliteration and antithesis, which have made them easier to be memorized. In short, proverbs have long been justifiably entitled a highly condensed encyclopedia, which is deep in meaning, pithy in form and pleasant in sound. Thus it is no doubt important for us to study and translate proverbs so that we may communicate more conveniently with each other, grasp more nations' cultures and customs, and use more languages better. Nonetheless, the good translation of proverbs is not an easy job to fulfill since different nations always have different cultures, histories and languages, which have together formed the diverse bases or deep meanings of proverbs and therefore have undoubtedly blocked the good grasp of such proverbs. To tackle this problem, it is helpful to pursue dynamic equivalence in translation because an excellent translation of proverbs usually means the reproduction of the closest natural equivalence of the source proverbs in the receptor language, first in terms of meaning, and secondly in terms of style. Hence the writer will mainly discuss the dynamic equivalence in translating proverbs in this paper so as to realize the reflection of the total characteristics of proverbs in rendering.However, such a study has not been given its due attention. Up to now, the author of this thesis has not found any single book devoted completely to this area, which means the combination of dynamic equivalence with translating proverbs is yet to be made. Therefore, the writer makes an attempt to probe into this field. Due to the limitation of her capacities and the size of this paper, she dares not to make any claim to be complete or exhaustive on this topic. Instead, she intends to deal with merely the Chinese-English and English-Chinese translations of proverbs to illustrate this point. The thesis is divided into six parts. The first part is an introduction. It briefly introduces the purpose and arrangement of this paper. In the second part, the writer mainly defines proverbs and expounds the importance of translating proverbs. Part Three concerns the factors influencing the English-Chinese translation and the Chinese-English translation of proverbs. These factors are mainly analyzed from the point of view of their cultures, linguistics, and so on. Based on different culturesbetween China and England, different environments, religions, histories, psychology and customs of proverbs are considered. In the perspective of linguistics, different linguistic characteristics between Chinese and English play an important role in the translation of proverbs, such as their syntactical features and stylistic features. Moreover, various source texts, target readers and purposes of the target text are also influential factors in translation.The fourth part is a general survey of current studies on rendering proverbs and a discussion about several problems existing in the translation of proverbs now. In this part, most translation orientations on proverbs are mentioned. In addition, four current problems such as translations without real understanding, in obscure written language, with the loss of national colors, and with the failure of maintaining artistry are pointed out here. And a few examples are also shown to explain them.In Part Five, the writer gives a detailed introduction to Nida's translation theory about dynamic equivalence and states the necessity of applying dynamic equivalence to the English-Chinese translation and the Chinese...