Translation Of Culture-loaded Words For Functional Equivalence

The Goldfinch, winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014, is a bestseller of American book market. The author, with a tender style of writing, portrayed a fascinating story of a famous painting. Full of long and complicated sentences, the novel contains lots of cultural and artistic knowledge. The cultural contents as well as differences between eastern and western cultures become the largest obstacle for the translation of the novel and the most valuable topic for the study of the translation. Therefore, this novel was chosen as the translation project for this thesis.With goals like knowledge and cultural communication, translation aims eventually to express the meaning of a text to the readers of target language. Therefore, during the process of translation, translators should take into consideration how to convey the original text and help readers to understand the target text. To analyze the translation, Eugene Nida's functional equivalence was adopted. Emphasizing on the dynamic equivalence of contents, the theory has provided a new orientation for translation. The translation of culture-loaded words is the major problem of this study for it's the largest obstacle during the translation practice. Based on Nida's classification, culture-loaded words in the novel have been divided into ecological, social, material, and linguistic culture-loaded words. Under the guidance of functional equivalence, on the basis of comprehending and explaining the words, methods like adopting expressions easily accepted by Chinese readers can be selected for better understanding and response of readers.