A Study Of Translation Strategies Of Culture-Loaded Terms In The Travels Of Lao Can From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

The Travels of Lao Can as one of the four denouncing novels of late Qing Dynasty, itplays an important role in the history of Chinese novel. The novel describes the colorful andvarious experiences of Lao Can. It not only reflects the people’s miserable life and thedarkness of the society, but also exposes the political corruption at the end of Qing Dynasty,especially the cruel of the so called honest official. And its language arts are regarded as thepreeminent one among the novels of the late Qing Dynasty.Eugene. Nida, as a famous linguist, he first puts forward that the role of reader shouldbe taken into consideration in the study of translation. With the proposal of functionalequivalence, he presents a new angel to the translation field. Nida not only provides that thefocuses should be on the “receptor’s response”, but also emphasizes that the main task oftranslation should achieve “the closest natural equivalent”. And a good translation should bereader-oriented and make target readers feel the same feeling as the source readers feel. Withthe proposal of functional equivalence, it can play a great guiding role in translating theculture-loaded terms in Chinese literal work.It contains an abundant of culture-loaded terms in The Travels of Lao Can. According toNida’s classification of culture factors, the author classified the culture-loaded terms in TheTravels of Lao Can into five categories: social culture culture-loaded terms, material cultureculture-loaded terms, linguistic culture culture-loaded terms, religious culture culture-loadedterms and ecological culture culture-loaded terms. And from the perspective of Nida’sfunctional equivalence, the author gives a detail discussion to analyze the two Englishversions and achieves two major findings: Firstly, summarizes four translation strategies toapply in translating culture-loaded terms: free translation, literal translation, transliteration,and annotation; Among them, the annotation should combine with other three methods astheir supplementary and explanation in the practice of translation. Secondly, in order toachieve the best translation and promote the cultural communication, if the literal translationcan achieve functional equivalence both in designative and associative meaning, then literaltranslation is enough; on the contrary, these four translation strategies should not be regardedas independent or separated from each other, they should complement each other and applied in a cooperative way.