| This is a translation project of two parts. The first part consists of a text in English and its Chinese translation by the author. The second part is a commentary on issues arising from the translation process. The English text is taken from the posthumous book Perfect Worlds:Utopian Fiction in China and the West (Amsterdam University Press,2011) by the late Dutch professor Douwe Fokkema, an accomplished sinologist and scholar of comparative literature.A seminal book of comparative literature, Perfect Worlds offers insights into and a comparative study of Chinese and Western utopian fiction as well as related philosophies and ethics. The erudite propositions and arguments put forward by Professor Fokkema are sure to inspire his Chinese colleagues in their studies of Chinese and Western utopian literature. The English text of this project comes from Chapter 7 "Chinese Philosophers and Writers Constructing Their Own Utopias," a study focusing on utopian fiction and philosophies of ancient China.This project has been completed under the guidance of the functional equivalence theory. Specifically, semantic extension as a translation strategy is used at the semantic level to deal with some difficult words, expressions, and technical terms. At the syntactic level, endeavors are made to achieve functional equivalence by reinventing sentence structures and following the original syntactic order. A major finding of this project boils down to the conclusion that, in handling such academic papers, the translator should conduct a thorough analysis on the translation work at the semantic level and the syntactic level and also should be careful with the translation of academic terms. The study of this project proves that the functional equivalence theory can be applied appropriately in translating academic papers on comparative literature. Findings of this project may also provide practical guidance to translators who undertake similar translation projects. |
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