A Report Of Literal Translation And Free Translation In Argumentative Essay

Big Fat Lies Women Tell Themselves is a social psychological book. This book aims to help women to realize lies that women tell themselves. Solutions are put forward to this kind of situation based on examples. At last, the author wants to help women to recall their self-esteem.Big Fat Lies Women Tell Themselves is a collection of argumentative essays. The argumentative essay is a kind of literary form which focuses on noting trifling matters and so that readers can learn the life philosophy from those matters. This kind of literary form combines the features of argumentation and essay. In the process of translating this book,functional equivalence theory is used as the basic theory. According to functional equivalence theory, translation is reproducing the same effect of source language from semantic meaning to literal form by using the most proper and equivalent language. Functional equivalence theory points out that semantic meaning is the most important part of source language. Being faithful to the form is the second priority. This theory aims to provide target language readers all the information of source language.Literal translation and free translation are two kinds of translation methods which are commonly used by the translator based on the functional equivalence theory. The translator conducts the research of literal translation and free translation based on the translation practice of the first sixteen lies in Big Fat Lies Women Tell Themselves as the original text. In this report, the translator applied translation strategies, such as: expressing the original meaning, following the original syntactic order, adapting the original meaning and reinventing the sentence structure of original text to present literal translation and free translation. During the translation process, the translator concluded: Literal translation means not only being faithful to the content of the original text but also being faithful to the form of the original text.However, free translation requires the translation version to meet the language habit of the target reader. When the literal translation cannot express the basic idea of the author or the translation version interferes the understanding of readers, the translator commonly applied free translation to express the original meaning. The first priority of both literal translation and free translation is faithful to the content of the original. In the process of the translation,literal translation and free translation should be combined with each other.