An Evaluation On The Translation Of Selected Tang Dynasty Stories

The emergence of the Tang Dynasty stories was the real beginning of the Chinese fiction. Having developed from the Six-Dynasty stories which constituted the embryonic form of Chinese fiction, the Tang Dynasty stories were also brought about by the political, economic, social and cultural situations of the Tang Dynasty. The culture of the Tang Dynasty is different not only from the modern Chinese culture in most cases but also from the Western culture. Therefore, translators need to attach great importance to the cultural elements entailed in the stories.The broad gap between the Tang culture and the Western culture has resulted in the fact that some words in the Tang Dynasty stories don't have equivalent expressions in the English language. Thus mere linguistic translation approaches are insufficient to transmit the ST information faithfully and completely. A truly excellent translation cannot be produced unless the linguistic translation approaches are combined with cultural equivalence which is best achieved through the approach of functional equivalence.After introducing the origin, development and features of the Tang Dynasty stories as well as the Tang culture reflected in these stories, this thesis studies, based on analyzing examples in each category with the guidance of the functional equivalence theory put forward by Nida, the Chinese-English version the Selected Literary Stories of the Tang Dynasty, written by Pei xing and translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, and categorizes the cultural elements contained in the stories. In the end, the significance of the culturally functional equivalence in the translation of the Tang Dynasty stories and the shift from mere linguistic translation to the combined approach of linguistic and cultural translation is proved.