The Functional Equivalence In Ancient Chinese Poetry Translation

The ancient Chinese poetry represented by Tang poems and Song ci is a literary treasure of China and the whole of mankind. And people never stop exploring its translation in the history. Ancient Chinese poetry, with its refined language, rich images and distinctive rhythm and rhyme, has attracted countless readers at home and abroad. However, the translation of ancient Chinese poetry has been a forbidden field for many translators. Premier Wen Jiabao quoted a lot of ancient Chinese poetry repeatedly in his speeches, and it becomes a window for the readers to understand ancient Chinese poetry and China.This paper tries to explore the translation of the ancient Chinese poetry under the guidance of Nida's functional equivalence. The functional equivalence goes beyond the comparison between the source text and the target text, and focuses on the readers'response. Countless scholars and theorists have attempted to apply this theory to explain translation phenomenon and guide the translation practice, including the translation of ancient Chinese poetry. However, the research on the translation of ancient Chinese poetry quoted in speeches is quite limited. Because of this, the author intends to make a research on the translation of ancient Chinese poetry in premier Wen's speeches under the guidance of functional equivalence theory.This paper is composed of six chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces the research background, the purpose and the significance of the thesis. In the second chapter, the author briefly reviews the researches on ancient Chinese poetry translation. In the third chapter, the introduction of the functional equivalence and related theories is clarified. The fourth chapter gives the research design of the paper, including the research questions, data collection and framework for data analysis. In the fifth chapter, the author concentrates on analyzing the application of functional equivalence in translating ancient Chinese poetry from lexeme level and syntactic level. The last chapter points out the application of functional equivalence in ancient Chinese poetry translation and the limitation of the thesis.