A Study Of Humor Translation In Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Nida’s Functional Equivalence

Pride and Prejudice is one of the famous works of the outstanding novelist, Jane Austen. This novel fully embodies Jane Austen’s writing style:using humorous language to reflect the big events through trifle stories. There are more than50kinds of translated versions about the novel. Among those, the Chinese versions translated by Wang Keyi, Sun Zhili and Zhang Yang and Zhang Ling are more popular. The thesis will study on Wang Keyi’s version. However, researches on the translation and the relative theory so far have been far from sufficient, especially from the perspective of Nida’s functional equivalence theory.Humorous language has its unique characteristics and functions, and the unique stage effects. Thus, in terms of humor translation, the translators should fully take the readers’response into account. Eugene Nida, the famous American linguist and translator, puts forward his famous functional equivalence theory, and the reader’s response is the core, which serves to solve the problem:which translation method should be adopted in the translation process, literal translation or free translation. Above all, the functional equivalence theory provides a new perspective for the humor translation.Unlike traditional theory, functional equivalence theory focuses on readers’ response, pointing out that the translation should achieve the closest natural equivalence. Functional equivalence theory emphasizes the meaning priority principle, but the importance of style should also be focused on. Based on the theory, this thesis will be presented to study Wang Keyi’s translated version of Pride and Prejudice in terms of meaning and style from the perspective of Nida’s functional equivalence theory.Besides the introduction and the conclusion, this thesis includes four chapters. The introduction part is a brief introduction of the research background, research purpose, research questions and research significance.The first chapter is the literature review. First, the chapter gives a brief introduction of the previous study on the original book of Pride and Prejudice both at home and abroad. Second, the chapter will provide the study on the translated versions of Pride and Prejudice. This chapter is to point out the lack of the study on the translated version from the perspective of functional equivalence theory. And then the theoretical framework of this thesis is called for.The second chapter is the theoretical framework of the thesis. This chapter introduces the essence of functional equivalence theory, summarizes the principles of producing functional equivalence and gives the main categories of the theories, thus laying the ground for the main part that follows.The third chapter is the main part of the thesis. This chapter focuses on the analysis of Wang Keyi’s translated version from the perspective of functional equivalence theory.The fourth chapter analyzes humor translation methods adopted by Wang keyi and points out that the concrete methods should focus on the two orientations of "natural" and "equivalent".The last part is the conclusion of the thesis. It concludes that Wang Keyi’s version achieves functional equivalence successfully and the adopted methods by Wang Keyi are summarized. Then the significance of the study is that it can supply certain references for the humor translation research. At last, the author sincerely hopes that this thesis can play a valuable role in arousing more significant researches.