Professional Vs Amateur: A Comparative Study On The Mainland And Taiwan Versions Of The Lord Of The Rings

As a representative work of Western fantasy literature, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy has rarely received any academic attention in the field of translation studies despite the fact that it has been translated into over 40 languages and viewed as "The book of the century". In order to fill the gap, the Author of this thesis conducts a comparative study on the two Chinese versions of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (the simplified-Chinese version published by the Yilin Press in the Mainland and the traditional-Chinese version by Lucifer Chu, an amateur translator in Taiwan) from a functionalist point of view, for the purposes of exploring its proper evaluation and guidance on the translation of fantasy literature.Under the guidance of functionalism, the thesis demonstrates the fact that different translators adopt different translation strategies for the same source text due to their different understanding of the translation purpose, text functions and readership, which in turn result in various target texts with different effects. Functionalism attaches great importance to communicative cross-cultural rendering, and therefore the translation of culture-loaded words, translation style and reader-response become an important evaluation criterion for the translation of fantasy literature due to the particularity of such a literary genre. Yilin's version is collectively done by three English professors who have been teaching in universities for years, while the Taiwan version is simply done by Lucifer Chu alone, a non-English/translation major and a graduate of Electrical Engineering who has nothing more than a great passion for fantasy literature. Comparing Yilin's "professional" version with Chu's "amateur" one, the Author argues that Chu's version shows a thorough understanding of the source text and the target readers, offering a good representation of the "fantasiness" in terms of translation style and cultural transmission, thus receiving a favorable response from the target readers and achieving its translation purpose. On the other hand, however, the translators from Yilin Press have neither a good understanding of fantasy literature nor a clear idea about their translation purpose or target reader-orientation, which results in a departure from the fantasy style and a lot of blunders in cultural transmission, thus increasing the reading difficulty for the target readers to some extent.In a word, functionalism emphasizes the dynamic coordination of various factors like the source text, translators, target texts and target readers so as to achieve a particular translation purpose. It has been proved that the functionalism brings a new perspective to the translation and evaluation of fantasy literature, paving the way for a better translation of the literary genre in the future.