Areport On English To Chinese Translation Of The 5^th Chapter Of Living Language: Reading, Thinking,and Writing—language For Fun: Humor In America

This thesis is a translation project. Living Language: Reading, Thinking, and Writing is an inspirational reference book meaningful for language study written by American writer Alleen Pace Nilsen. The author examines many topics that today’s bright young people like to think and write about. And in keeping with the philosophy that English classes are an appropriate place for students to learn about language processes. This book involves nine chapters. The translator chooses the fifth chapter as her translation project. In the fifth chapter, the author expresses her opinion about humor in America. As we all know, humor plays a surprisingly large part in American culture. This chapter shows us humor is much too complicated. It isn’t enough look just at the subject of a joke, we also need to look at the attitude of the joke teller, who is the intended audience, and the situation out of which the joke develops, which includes the frame of mind of both the teller and the listeners. Because of such complications, the translation of this chapter is meaningful both in education and in language study.There are great diversities in sentence patterns, expressions, and in thinking mode between English and Chinese, which leads to in-equivalence in translation. Literal translation sometimes can causes mechanical translation and mistranslation. To solve this problem, this essay mainly talks about Eugen A Nida’s translation theory of functional equivalence in the translation project of Living Language: Reading,Thinking, and Writing, giving a general idea to readers when to adopt principle of functional equivalence.(a) When literal translation of humor is difficult to be understood.(b) When literal translation of humor is unable to express implied meaning of the original.(c) When the source language comes down to culture differences. In this three circumstances, the application of functional equivalence make readers get a comprehension understanding of original book, which is difficult for readers to reach with literal translation.