Selected E-C Translation Of Encounters At The Heart Of The World:a History Of The Mandan People And A Critical Commentary

This MTI translation report focuses on analyzing the translation approaches and techniques the translator adopts in the translation of the fifth chapter of Encounters at the Heart of the World:A History of the Mandan People in an attempt to discuss how to achieve functional equivalence in translation.Encounters at the Heart of the World:A History of the Mandan People, from which Chapter 5 is taken as the source text, is a history literary work written by Elizabeth A. Fenn, an American woman writer who has won the Pulitzer Prize. The translated chapter mainly describes the ceremonial and daily life of the Mandan people. Based on archaeological and anthropological studies, the writer lively represents the tribe’s ceremonial and daily life, which was not historically recorded by former scholars.To make the Chinese readers have the same or similar response as the readers of the source text, functional equivalence should be the goal of the translation. In addition to being faithful to the original text in meaning, the translator has to make the translation clear and concise in order to be as vivid as the original. However, the chapter contains abundant historical and Indian words, making it difficult to achieve functional equivalence in translation.The report uses examples from the translation to illustrate how the translator has adopted the approach of free translation by using several specific translation techniques to achieve functional equivalence.