A Report On The Translation Of Gay Fictions: Wilde To Stonewall(Chapter 2) Based On The Functional Equivalence Theory

As the cultural exchange among different countries has been further pushed forward by globalization, translation has played a more and more significant role. In this process, the translation of some foreign originals is helpful for those scholars and readers who are interested in foreign originals. Therefore, the author is to present a report on the translation of Claude J. Summers’ s Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall——Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition(Chapter 2).In China, there is still no literary criticism on homosexual import emerging in foreign literatures conducted in a systemic way, which makes this translation become meaningful in the academic community and function as a proper guide for target readers to touch those homosexual feelings implicit in gay fictions. The source text in this translation report is one of the chapters chosen from the above-mentioned book, which mainly talks about Oscar Wilde’s homosexual context in both his life and his works. This chapter makes an in-depth analysis of Wilde’s three significant works, revealing their homosexual import in an organized way. Undoubtedly, the translation of this chapter will be instrumental for the further study of Oscar Wilde and his works.On the basis of the “Functional Equivalence” theory developed by Eugene A. Nida, an American linguist, translator and translation theorist, this translation report mainly deals with translation techniques adopted and problems arising in the translation. The theory insists that translation should not be word-for-word correspondence, but the correspondence in function between two languages. Nida has emphasized the importance of the acceptance of a translated text by the intended reader in the receptor language and pointed out that translation should convey both the literal and cultural information. Therefore, the translator is about to use Eugene A. Nida’s “Functional Equivalence” as a guidance and criterion for this translation. In accordance with the “Functional Equivalence”, translation techniques, such as subtraction, addition and combination, are used to achieve functional equivalence on the level of word, sentence and discourse. Meanwhile, Chinese four-word expressions, figures of speech and footnotes are also used to obtain cultural equivalence in the translation. All these efforts are made to achieve functional equivalence to ensure that target readers are able to understand and appreciate the translated text in basically the same way as the original readers do.This report falls into two chapters. Chapter one is about the translation, which includes the source text and the target text. Chapter two is about the translation report, which is divided into four sections. The first section is a brief introduction to the background, purposes and meaning of the whole translation task. The second section is about the translation procedures, introducing respectively preparations before translation, the theory and techniques adopted during translation and revisions after translation. The third section is about case studies, discussing some difficulties that the author has encountered during translation and their possible solutions put forward by the author. The fourth section sums up the application of the functional equivalence theory in the whole translation task, and briefs the enlightenment and prospect for future translation work.