E-C Translation Of Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction In China And The West (Chapter 6) And Critical Commentary

The translation project contains two parts:the selected translation of Perfect Worlds:Utopian Fiction in China and the West (chapter Ⅵ) and its critical commentary. The author is the famous comparatist Douwe Fokkema. There are five sections in this chapter and each section discusses the descriptions of "Chinese utopia" in different literary works and expounds the views on appearance and development of utopian culture in China from different scholars. The chapter leads the reader to know the main idea of utopian culture and how this culture is embodied in different cultural background. Differently from Edward Said whose references to Orientalism nearly always imply a negative judgment, the author here makes a neutral commentary on Chinese literature and culture.The project mainly applies Nida’s Functional Equivalence as the guide theory which aims to maintain functional equivalence between the source text and the translated text. The source text contains the discussion about famous literary works and philosophical thoughts. Besides the functional equivalence, the project adopts some corresponding translation strategies in the translation process. Due to the obvious difference between English and Chinese, translation cannot achieve complete equivalence of the source text and the target text. However, by using a variety of translation strategies and plenty of grammatical analyses, the translation can reduce the differences in the translation process and achieve functional equivalence between the source text and the target text. In conclusion, under the guidance of functional equivalence theory, the translation can achieve functional equivalence between the source text and the target text by applying translation strategies flexibly and appropriately.