On Annotations In The English Version Of Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Nida's Functional Equivalence

Annotation, as a supplementary method adopted in the translation from one language to another, has been frequently applied to the literary translation. Fortress Besieged is co-translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao. The most remarkable thing of this version is the section of annotations, which is one of important factors that bring the novel to a great success in the West.Nida's functional equivalence is often simplified into the theory of reader's response. This thesis will take the stance of Nida's functional equivalence to make a case study on annotations of the English version of Fortress Besieged and find out how annotations are taken to achieve functional equivalence.The present thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one is an introduction, presenting a general account of the significance, approach and overall structure of this thesis.Chapter two is literature review. This chapter gives a review of previous researches on annotation and points out the necessity of further study on annotation in the literary translation. Then this chapter looks back on the previous studies on annotations of Fortress Besieged and introduces the theory of Nida's functional equivalence to this study.Chapter three serves as the theoretical framework for this research. This part goes over the development of Nida's functional equivalence, and then analyzes the feasibility of the application of this theory to annotations in literary translation.Chapter four is one main part of this thesis, a study on annotations in Fortress Besieged from the perspective of Nida's functional equivalence to analyze the specific situations under which annotations are taken to achieve functional equivalence.Chapter five is mainly discussing the principles that the translators comply with when they select proper annotation methods:the principle of distracting target readers to the least degree and the principle of compatibility between the contents of annotations and the translation lines where the annotated items are, the first principle should take priority over the second one.Chapter six serves as a conclusion which summarizes what has been discussed above and provides suggestions for further research.The author of this thesis hopes that this study will be helpful for the translators to take annotations when they are engaged in Chinese-English literary translation.