On The Translation Of The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy From The Perspective Of Equivalence

The term "equivalence" became a main theme of western translation theories since the1950s. And it was widely accepted as a strategy and system of theory. As time goes by,equivalence theory didn’t fade out of people’s sights, however it had been evoluted andprocessed as time goes by, new terms and branches were developed and discussed. This thesiswill mainly focus on equivalence as a translation strategies on fiction.The lord of the rings trilogy is a classic high fantasy masterpiece wrote by J.R.R. Tolkien.As a professor from Oxford University, Tolkien applied sophisticated skills and elegantlanguage to the book. This thesis aims at proper translation in fictional work, bases on thetheoretical background on equivalence theory, which would retrospect to the beginning of thepropose from Vinay and Darbelnet. By analysis between the original English text and theChinese translation text, thus we will discuss the effectuation of equivalence from source text totarget text, and also the difficulties we face when achieving equivalence. Case analysis falls intofour levels,(1) lexical level;(2) sentence level;(3) discourse level;(4) cultural level. and eachlevel will be further divided into four types,(1) the influence of conveying the meaning by thechoice of translation strategy;(2) the preserving of the language variety by the difference oftranslation skills;(3) the dilemma of equivalence caused by the different characters betweenChinese and English language;(4) difficulty caused by different cultural background. Throughthe analysis of different types and levels of cases, we could draw the conclusion that totalequivalence is hard to achieve while translators should not be restricted to certain theories andrules, be flexibility and creativity are important characters for translating.