Translation Of Children's Literature Under Nida's Functional Equivalence

Children's literature translation is a special yet ignored branch of literature translation studies for its special readership. Because of the unique characteristics of cognition and linguistic ability of children plus gaped cultural distance, the children's literature translation poses a great and inevitable challenge to translators. As a matter of fact, children's literature translation is as difficult as, if not more difficult than adults'. At the very beginning of the paper, the author emphasizes the need of the present study. When translating for children, the translators must keep it in mind that the readers of the translation are young children. The translation should guarantee that it is easy for the target young readers to understand and accept the meaning of the source work via their reading, so that they can get similar impression, inspiration and education as that of the original readers.The writer of this thesis attempts to discuss the translation of children's literature from the integration of Nida's functional equivalence theory and childe-orientation with a comparative case study of several Chinese versions of the English novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from the perspectives of meaning equivalence and stylistic equivalence and cultural equivalence. Unlike traditional translation theory, the principle of Functional Equivalence proposed by Nida provides a new set of criteria for translation criticism. This theory aims at producing a translation that is the closest natural equivalent of the original message, so as to be as distinctly understood and felt by the target language receptor as by the source language receptor. The translation theories in the past stressed the correspondence between the source language (SL) and target language (TL) and studied translation simply from the transference of languages. Differently, Functional equivalence emphasizes the role of the receptors and points out the purpose of translation are that the receptors should respond to the TL message with substantially the same manner to the SL receptors do to the original. Functional equivalence theory provides theoretical guidance for the translation children's literature. At the same time, the receptors of the children's literature are mostly children; translators should take their psychological characteristics into consideration. and as for the cultural equivalence is concerned, translators should adopt domestication as the primary strategy and foreignization as the supplementary in translation practice, so as to guarantee children readers'smooth and pleasant reading and understanding.The paper consists of six parts.Part One is the introduction to the topic and the construction of the thesis. Part Two is about the definition, classification as well as the characteristics of children's literature and gives a brief account to the book and its translated versions. Part Three serves as the theoretical framework, and it discusses the translation of children's literature from the perspective of functional equivalence theory, analyses functional equivalence theory in detail and tries to put forward the translation of children's literature should follow the principle of children-orientation in light of functional equivalence theory. The writer of this thesis attempts to integrate Nida's functional equivalence theory and Dewey's child-orientation into children's literature translation, and help to solve the translating problems. Part Four and Five are the case study which makes a tentative analysis of several translated versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from the perspectives of meaning equivalence, stylistic equivalence and cultural equivalence. After the analysis comments are made that good children's literature translation should not only be aware of the receptor ,but also follow the principle of child-orientation, when encountering cultural factors, translators should try to adopt domestication as the primary strategy and foreignization as the supplementary in translation practice, so as to guarantee children readers'smooth and pleasant reading and understanding. Part Six draws the conclusion.