A Report On The Translation Of The Paying Guests (Chapter Ⅰ) Under The Functional Equivalence Theory

This is a report on the translation of Sarah Waters’s historical fiction The Paying Guests. The novel was published in August 2014. There hasn’t been a Chinese version yet. This is one of the reasons that the author choose it as the text to translate. Waters is a famous British writer, who is the member of Royal Society of Literature, and she was selected as one of twenty "Best of Young British Writers". Deeply loved by readers, her works has won numerous awards. The theme of the novel The Paying Guests is unique, which is a story about lesbian, and this is another reason that the author choose it.The report was completed under the guidance of Functional Equivalence Theory of the American translation theorist Eugene Nida. "Functional Equivalence"focuses on the equivalence in the aspects of form and content, including lexical equivalence, syntactic equivalence, textual equivalence and stylistic equivalence. According to Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory, the report chooses examples to discuss translation methods and skills from lexical and syntactic levels. To achieve the lexical equivalence, the author uses the methods of turning phrases into clauses and the conversion of part of speech, and to achieve the syntactic equivalence, the author uses the methods of amplification, omission, division and combination.According to the translation practice, the author realized the importance of understanding the theoretical knowledge and applying it in practice, which has great help for translators finishing higher quality translation.