On Reproducing Humorous Effect Of "Fortress Besieged" In English-A Functional Equivalence Perspective

Since Nida developed a system of functional equivalence, scholars engaged in the study of translation have held different ideas on this theory. One of the criticizers is Peter Newmark, who advocates that different strategies should be adopted for the translation of different text types. He thinks that semantic translation, source-language and source-culture oriented, should be applied in the translation of expressive texts, such as literary works. In this light, the present thesis aims at justifying the applicability of Nida's functional equivalence to translation of literary works through the case study on the reproduction of humorous effect in Fortress Besieged by Mr. Qian Zhongshu.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part introduces the motivation of writing this thesis, the language materials to be used and the structure of it.The second part is the literature review where the author firstly summarizes the previous studies on the concept of equivalent effect and then briefly accounts the theory of functional equivalence, which is the theoretical basis of this thesis. The author mainly focuses on three aspects of the theory, namely, the new focus on the response of target receptors, the application of Information Theory to translation, and the two types of equivalence. They are the essence of this theory and correlate closely with the discussion in the second chapter.The third part which is the second chapter explains the reasons why it is suitable to guide humor translation in the light of Nida's functional equivalence. The author extends the elaboration from two angles, the"encoding"and"decoding"of humor, with the focus on the latter one. The functional equivalence theory and the rhetorical study share a common research focus, namely, the receptor; and humorous rhetoric possesses a large amount of language-specific and culture-specific properties that greatly overload the communication channel in the target cultural setting, the problem of which could be properly solved by those adjustment techniques based on the Information Theory.The fourth part which is the third chapter is the case study of Fortress Besieged. The author summarizes the major types of humorous rhetorical devices in Fortress Besieged, picks up the corresponding typical examples of translation and sorts out these specific instances according to their translation methods. These methods include the following five categories: literal translation, addition, subtraction, alteration and annotation. Each of these methods is illustrated with two or three translation instances in Fortress Besieged. For those improper translation instances that fail to produce functional equivalence, the author suggests her version of translation after the example analysis.The last part is the conclusion in which the author points out the implications of the research and limitations of the present study.