| Ancient Chinese fables, a major component of Chinese culture, are the preciousspiritual wealth for all the people on the earth. Hence, the high quality translation of ancientChinese fables in simple English, refined language and vivid story with a profound moral issure to present the essence of the Chinese culture for the people across the world to share andconsequently deepen the mutual cultural exchange.Functional equivalence theory developed by Eugene A. Nida aims to realize themaximum effect of the information transmission and, at the same time, solve themiscommunication between two languages caused by the cultural heterogeneity and providethe language beginners with a meaning-equivalent book, simple and easy enough to beunderstood by anyone. No matter what their literacy level is, they can learn something in theconcise and clean stories. And by reading such a reader-friendly popularized translated text,more foreigners will get to know Chinese culture very soon, which definitely helps carry outChina’s Going-Global strategyThis thesis employs dynamic/functional equivalence theory to make a comparativestudy of the four English versions of selected ancient Chinese fables, carefully selects thesame eight ancient Chinese fables from them and analyzes the four aspects including lexicon,syntax, discourse and rhetoric levels respectively. The thesis, in quantitative and qualitativeanalyses of the eight fables, tries to prove how the translators of the four English versions useappropriate translation strategies and methods or skills to achieve “the closest and mostnatural equivalence” between the source language text and the target language one. Also, thethesis analyzes how closely the quality of the translated text is related to the translators’background, how the four versions differ from each other in their own narrative structure,and what and why the translators contribute to and lose in their translations. Based on thecomparative analysis of the eight selected ancient Chinese fables in the four English versions, the following findings can be reached: first, the four versions achieve functional equivalencein transmitting information although they might differ in some way or other due to theirdifferent competences in bilingualism, biculturalism and language performance, and theversion translated by Tang Dunyan and Cai Wenqian seems to be inferior to the other threefrom the four aspects of the comparative study; second, functional equivalence theory is ofinstructive significance in the translation practice of culture-related texts including fables. Inthe process of translating fables from paratactic Chinese to hypotactic English, the translatorsexcept Tang Dunyan and Cai Wenqian make great efforts to reorganize the narrativestructure in the needs of the TL readers’ reading habit and expectation. Sometimes they haveto retain the meaning at the cost of forms if they fail to achieve equivalence in meaning andform concurrently while Tang Dunyan and Cai Wenqian are too much subject to the SL text,translate each text line by line with many simple repetitions of words and expressions; third,the translators respectively adopt strategies of foregnization, domestication, word-for-wordtranslation and rewriting to promote Chinese culture for the TL readers. What translationstrategies and skills should be applied in fable translations will directly result in how manycultural factors in the original text can be accepted by the translation text readers, and thecomparative study will inevitably play a referential role in the translation practice of culture-related texts, and undoubtedly enrich teaching contents by providing supplementary cases fortranslation classroom teaching in the future, and hopefully offer readers some technicalreferences to study in what ways Chinese classics in English would be promoted at homeand abroad. |
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