On Achieving Stylistic Equivalence In Translation—A Translation Report On China Dolls

This MTI translation report focuses on analyzing approaches the translator adopts in the translation of two chapters of China Dolls in an attempt to discuss how to achieve stylistic equivalence in translation.China Dolls, from which Chapter 2 of Part I and Chapter 2 of Part II are taken as the source text, is a novel written by Lisa See, a Chinese American woman writer, in 2013. These two chapters are the stories narrated by Helen, one of the three main characters in the novel. The content of these two chapters ranges from dance movements, clothes to food and aphorisms, full of distinctive style and strong cultural atmosphere. As a bi-lingual and bi-culture literature, this book contains a lot of idiomatic phrases, brief colloquial expressions, figurative expressions and slang, which make it difficult to achieve stylistic equivalence in translating these two chapters.By enumerating and analyzing typical examples in the translation, this MTI translation report compares approaches of literal translation and free translation and analyzes typical examples in the translation from three strategies based on free translation—omission, semantic variation and semantic explication. It suggests that free translation is more effective in achieving stylistic equivalence.