An Analysis Of Effect Equivalence In Zhang Zhenyu’s Translation Of Moment In Peking

What is translation? Or what is the nature of translation? This is a question that translator should answer. In fact, translation is a complex case that needs a way to solve the problem so that readers could accept, and it also needs both the author and the translator to have equal level of knowledge and language application ability.Since1960s, when Eugene A. Nida, an American translation theorist, first pointed out the equivalence theory, it has cast a profound impact on the translation circles. When this theory was introduced to China in1980s, Jin Di, a translator and translation theorist of China, put this theory in a perfect way, and gave his own views on translation theory from various aspects. In the equivalence theory, the most important is readers’response. It expects the source text readers and the target text readers getting the equal response. It means that, the feeling between the source text readers and the target text readers should be basically same. Equivalence theory advocates to use the natural language to translate the content of language, and put forward the formal equivalence and semantic equivalence. And it tends to use the domestication to translate the content of culture, in order to eliminate this culture difference and help readers to understand the text. The book of Moment in Peking is written in English and its target readers are English-speaking people who do not know or know little about the Chinese culture. So in the book, Lin Yutang introduces the Chinese nation and thousands of years of Chinese culture by using an accurate, fluent and beautiful contemporary’ English language. When translating such works, translator not only needs to consider the problem of language, but also should consider the problem of culture. When translating the aspect of language, there is a premise that does not prejudice the meaning of the source text, and make the target text getting the formal equivalence or semantic equivalence. When translating the aspect of culture, translators mainly use domestication translation strategy, not only to convey the content of source text, but also accurately convey the original cultural significance. So in this thesis, the writer takes equivalence theory from Eugene A. Nida and Jin Di as theoretical guidance, Zhang Zhenyu’s translation of Moment in Peking as the object of study.Besides the introduction and conclusion, this thesis includes three chapters. Chapter one is literature review which introduces equivalence theory of Eugene A. Nida and Jin Di, and the application of equivalence theory in novel translation. Chapter two introduces the formal equivalence and semantic equivalence, and evaluates Zhang Zhenyu’s translation from the aspect of language, that is, Zhang Zhenyu makes both formal equivalence and semantic equivalence in the target text. Chapter three introduces the cultural differences and the reader’s response, translation methods of domestication and foreignization, and analyses the cultural factors in Zhang Zhenyu’s translation. The last part is the conclusion. It points out that the equivalence theory plays a very important role in guiding the translation.