A Report On The Translation Of The Probable Future

The material the author translated is published by Random House Publishing Group in2003, named The Probable Future, which was provided by author’s friend. The novel has notbeen translated. Author is in charge of Chapter One.The author of this novel is Alice Hoffman, a popular novelist. She began this book soonafter her mother died, and then she was thinking the complicated and amazing relationshipbetween mother and daughter. And she was close to her grandmother. Besides, she had abreast cancer at that time. So all her experiences and emotion were added into this novel, thusan amazing novel was completed. This novel tells us a story of Sparrow family. Only girlswere born in this family and on the birthday of thirteen of each girl, they will be gifted. Andthis novel focus on mother-daughter relationship and the growth of a girl named Stella.This thesis consists of four parts. The first part describes the task and introduces theauthor and her works. The second part gives the processes of writing this thesis. The third partintroduces the functional equivalence of Nida, and gives convincing proofs of theapplicability of the functional equivalence in the translation of literary novel. The last part istranslation summary. There are two crucial factors for the translation of novel, namely, thetransfer of the meaning and that of the style, which have been studied in details. Withreference to many translation principles and criterion, it comes out that Nida’s functionalequivalence is the very theory to guide the translation of novel for its emphasis on the transferof the meaning and the response of the reader. So the author adapted the functionalequivalence as guidance. However, English and Chinese languages have different culturalbackground, and there are distinctive gaps between their expression and thinking. It isimpossible to represent all the stylistic features of the original. So this thesis focuses on the meaning, style and culture, with the guidance of functional equivalence of Nida, thus theequivalence of source language and target language can be realized.After finishing the translation, author realized that translation is an exceedinglycomplex activity rather than a simple conversion from one word or one sentence or oneparagraph to another. Being a qualified translator needs to be a master with bilingual language;needs to know something of everything and know everything of something; needs to beskillful in using translation skills guided by different theories. And taking the capability ofChinese readers into consideration, a translator should follow principles of promoting culturalcommunication and knowing foreign culture. And he should also bring the beauty of sourcelanguage to the readers with target language through conveying meaning, style and culture.Making the translation better is what the author needs to do.