On Moss Roberts' Translation Of Chinese Idioms In Three Kingdoms From A Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

Three Kingdoms is one of China's greatest classical novels, unfolding a vast and moving panorama of social history. One of the distinctive characteristics of this novel is the easily accessible classical language, which contains the extensive use of idioms. According to the roughly statistics, more than 400 Chinese idioms are used to describe characters,wars and the state of an event. So the translation of Chinese idioms in Three Kingdoms plays a very important role. Scholars have made many researches on Three Kingdoms, but most of the researches focus on its authorship,theme, dynasty and version and so on. However, up to now, nobody has made a study about the English translation of Chinese idioms in Three Kingdoms. As so many Chinese idioms used in it and the important role they play, this thesis attempts to analyze Moss Roberts'translation of Chinese idioms from the perspective of Nida's Functional Equivalence.Functional Equivalence is the most important and influential translation theory advanced by Eugene.A. Nida. It stresses achieving the closest natural equivalent to the source text, first in meaning, secondly in style. However, this theory also emphasizes the importance of form. Besides different from the traditional translation theories which mainly emphasize the elements of language, such as grammar, sentence structure and so on, Functional Equivalence shifts its attention more on cultural differences and reader's response. Chinese idioms have fixed form, contain rich meaning and are full of Chinese culture. As a sort of standard for evaluating the quality of translation, Functional Equivalence is also suitable for the evaluation of Chinese idioms'translation. Thus, as for the translation of Chinese idioms, how to transfer their rich meanings and at the same time keep their original forms and their abundant culture is really a tough job for the translators. While, as for the translation of Chinese idioms in Three Kingdoms, whether Moss Robert has achieved functional equivalence or in order to achieving functional equivalence, what translation strategies does Moss Roberts adopt? All these are the important problems for this thesis to solve.This thesis consists of three chapters except introduction and conclusion.The introduction includes three parts. They are literature review, the aims of this paper and the fabric of the paper.Chapter one is about the research on translation equivalence and Nida's Functional Equivalence. In this chapter, firstly, the overall study of translation equivalence is introduced, and then, Nida's Functional Equivalence is discussed in great details.Chapter two is an introduction to Chinese idioms, in which the definitions, characteristics and classification of Chinese idioms are discussed.Chapter three is the analysis of Moss Roberts'translation of Chinese idioms in Three Kingdoms from the perspective of Functional Equivalence. In this chapter, the author firstly classifies the idioms in Three Kingdoms into three categories, and then illustrates the translation of those three categories one by one under the guidance of Functional Equivalence. Finally, according to the previous analysis, the author makes a discussion on the translation strategies used by Moss Roberts.Conclusion is the summary of the whole thesis.