On Functional Equivalence In Dialect Translation Of The Scholars From The Perspective Of Literary Expressive Function

The Scholars is one of the most influential Chinese classical literary works, which iscompleted in the Qing Dynasty. As the first vernacular novel of satire in Chinese literaryhistory, The Scholars portrays various men of letters and scholars in the late Qing Dynastyvividly, and the writing achieves quite a high artistic level which the cotemporary fictions canhardly get. As Lu Xun once commented in Brief History of Chinese Fiction,"No matterofficials, scholars, celebrities, recluses, or even ordinary towns folks, The Scholars describesthem so vivid for readers that they can almost see the figures in the book stand right in frontof eyes." And this outstanding expressiveness benefits from the use of dialect in The Scholars.At present, The Scholars is drawing more and more attention in the academic area andfurthering the research on its English version. Among so many researches, however, thetranslation study of dialect expressions is left open.Under Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory, the thesis analyses examples ofdialect translations in Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s translation version of The Scholarsfrom the perspective of literary expressive function theory. According to the dialect words’expressive functions, the discussion is divided into three aspects of characterization function,contextualization function and affection function. Based on the above analysis, the authortries to sum up the translating strategies and skills used by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang intranslations of dialect expressions. The purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to providetranslation researchers a new horizon. Meanwhile, the author hopes the thesis can enlightentranslators to make a more reasonable and objective analysis on the readers’ reading responsesto dialect expressions in pre-translation by means of literary theory and to choose a mostappropriate translating strategy to achieve "the closest natural equivalence" in dialecttranslations.The thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter One is a general introduction of the study. In this part, the research background,research questions and the significance and structure of the study are explained.Chapter Two is an introduction to the theoretical basis of the research. In this chapter,firstly, the author will make a brief review of the development of functional equivalence, and the important concepts in functional equivalence theory will be discussed in detail. Secondly,the expressive function theory will be briefly introduced.Chapter Three is a discussion about the functional equivalence of dialect translation inThe Scholars from the perspective of expressive function theory. The analysis is divided intothree aspects: characterization function, context reduction function and affection function.Chapter Four is a tentative research of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s translatingstrategies based on the former analysis.Chapter Five is the summary of the whole thesis. The limitation of the thesis andsuggestions for further study are also be discussed in this part.