Translation Strategies Of The Sea Lady Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence

This is a translation practice report based on Chapter 1 of Margaret Drabble’s The Sea Lady, which discribes the situation of Ailsa attending an academic award ceremony as a judge, the chat between Ailsa and some old friends, and her memory of the past. The original text is a novel with a lot of psychological and detail descriptions. As a plenty of writing skills are contained in The Sea Lady, it is conducive to developing translation competence. Meanwhile, the spirit in the book has social value. Hence the novel was chosen to be the text of the translation practice.The translated text must embody all the thoughts of the original text in literary translation, combining the content with artistic charm to keep the appreciation and literariness. Functional equivalence theory emphasizes sense equivalence and reader’s response, which is consistent with literary translation’s demand of dynamism and interactivity. So, under the guidance of functional equivalence theory, the problems and strategies in translating The Sea Lady are discussed. Aiming to reduce the cultural differences of Chinese and English, functional equivalence theory is combined with some translation strategies to make target-language readers and source-language readers reach an identity of their impressions in reading.The report introduces literature review, task description, process description, case analysis and summary. In case analysis, it is studied from word equivalence, syntax equivalence and discourse equivalence. With specific translation methods, the translation strategies are summarized to convey the exact meaning of the original text.