A Report On The Translation Of Modern Chinese Prose From The Perspective Of Equivalence Theory

With the development of Chinese economy and the further opening to the outside world,international exchanges between China and other countries are much more frequent and more and more Chinese literature works have been introduced to other countries. Modern Chinese prose is an important part of extensive and profound Chinese culture and literature works, so translation of modern Chinese prose becomes increasingly important. Even though various translation organizations have been developing rapidly in recent decades, translation of modern Chinese prose has not been paid as much attention as other fields.Furthermore, there are few theoretical works on translation of modern Chinese prose.Therefore, it’s of great significance to explore translation of modern Chinese prose from the perspective of equivalence theory. Equivalence theory mainly consists of two parts: formal equivalence and functional equivalence. The former is basically source-oriented; in other words, it aims at revealing the form and content of original message as much as possible. While the latter is basically reader’s response; that is, it seeks the closest natural equivalence to the source language message so as to help the target readers have same response in terms of appreciating and understanding of original texts as source language readers. We ought to adopt formal or functional equivalence translation in different situations. As a result, the translator can translate modern Chinese prose translation better. Prose is unique with the following features: emotional, elegant,brief but concise language, scrambled in appearance but united in spirit. In terms of formal equivalence, we tend to adopt literal translation, transliteration and foreignization; while in terms of functional translation, we usually choose literal translation and domestication. Besides, due to unique features of prose, we propose to resort such translation strategies as amplification,omission, reconstruct, and translation plus annotation to guide the modern Chinese prose translation. At last, this research theoretically proves that the equivalence theory is very useful for translation of modern Chinese prose and such translation methods and skills are applicable for translation of modern Chinese prose.