The Humor Translation In The English Version Of Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

Literary works, as one of the important carriers of human culture, have been drawing people’s attention all the time. Under present international circumstance, literary translation works emerge continuously for catering to public taste to foreign culture."Humor" is one of special manifestations of literature, also is one of the difficulties during translation. The definition popularly approved and quoted by the translation field is from Nida and Taber:"Translation consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning, and secondly in terms of style.’ The final purpose of pursuing "equivalence" is to make target text readers response equivalently as the readers of source text. Regarding to the humor of literary works, readers of target language need to obtain the artistic feeling from humor style like the readers of source language. Fortress Besieged, as a classic modern novel, is a satirical novel full of comedy. The version translated by Kelly and Nathan Mao is the first one, whose advantages and disadvantages are manifested obviously on humor translation. Under the direction of equivalence translation theory and analysis of humor style interpretation, this thesis, taking English version of Fortress Besieged as an instance, analyzes appropriate and inappropriate interpretation on humor style of original work, and concludes the obstacles of translating humor style existing in literary works.The paper divided into four parts:chapter one Literature Review First, introduction to Fortress Besieged and the author of this work; next, description of humor translation in this work; third, summary of predecessor’s research on humor translation in Fortress Besieged, chapter two Introduction to Nida’s functional equivalence theory. This chapter contains the contents of functional equivalence theory and the contribution to translation research, chapter three Based on the functional equivalence theory, the appropriate and inappropriate points in the English version of Fortress Besieged are analyzed from the perspectives of figure of speech, vocabulary, translation methods and notes, chapter four is conclusion:Through case analysis, the limitations of the authors’ translation are pointed out as well as the limitations of humor translation under the direction of functional equivalence theory.