On Specious Translations

It is well known that figures of speech are varied forms of language, which exist in all human languages. Therefore, they take up an important part in translation activities. In the translation practices, especially literary translations, it is found that for various reasons, mistranslations are not rare to encounter in both Chinese-English and English-Chinese translations. Generally speaking, this is due to the reason that some translators do not know the two languages well enough. However, after being further observed, the mistranslations of figures are more specious. Specious translations, though subordinate to mistranslations, are worse than the latter because they are superficially right at the first sight and are characterized by achieving exact equivalent forms between Chinese and English, which make them more easily accepted by the target text readers and extremely misleading. As we all know, the special functions, structures and methods play a key role in expressing meanings; thus, one could not help asking the questions:do the specious translations in figures of speech have something to do with the structural characteristics of figures themselves? How to judge whether a translation of a figure is specious? How to deal with and correct these specious translations of figures? What are the essential reasons for these specious translations? These are the questions waiting to be answered in this thesis.In the ocean of translation theories at home and abroad, the functional equivalence by Nida is one of the most acknowledged. There are two kinds of equivalences:one is the formal equivalence, the other, dynamic equivalence (functional equivalence). Formal equivalence focuses both on the form and content of the information itself, while dynamic equivalence mainly emphasizes that the readers of a translated text should be able to understand and appreciate it in essentially the same manner as the original readers do. To sum up, functional equivalence intends to have the target text readers get the same response as the source text readers do, and when meaning and form could not be maintained, meaning should get priority over form. In this sense, for the translation of figures, whose communicating of information mainly resorts to the special structures and methods, there is no translation theory more appropriate to adopt than the functional equivalence by Nida.Therefore, this thesis aims at digging out the reasons for the specious translations of figurative languages from the perspective of Nida's functional equivalence by case study and making comparisons of Chinese and English, thus to provide reference for the translation activities, so as to help translators maximally avoid specious translations of figures of speech.