A Report On The Translation Of “A Good Fall”

The report is based on the translation of the short story “A Good Fall” written by Ha Jin, a Chinese American writer. The story is about the life of Chinese immigrants in Flushing, New York. Told in English about Chinese people in America, the story is different from writings by native American writers in that the characters and the plot seem to be more familiar to Chinese people. In order to obtain the closest natural equivalence between the source text and the target text, the translator decided on the functional equivalence theory as the guiding theory of the translation practice.This report is divided into four parts. Chapter One offers a brief introduction of the source text and the translation requirements. Chapter Two describes the translation process.Chapter Three is the theoretical framework about Nida’s functional equivalence theory and its application in short story translation. Chapter Four, the main body of the report,analyzes typical examples in “A Good Fall” at three levels: the lexical level, the syntactical level and the textual level. Translation strategies such as addition, omission, conversion,linear order translation, etc are applied to convey the source text information and obtain the closest natural translated version.