Translation Report On Pistols And A Cowboy Hat Of China Dolls

The author of China Dolls is Lisa See, a Chinese-American novelist. This novel with about 120 thousand words was published in 2014. Until now there is no Chinese version of this book. China Dolls describes the life of Chinese-Americans in Chinatown in the 1930 s and 1940 s. The translated material is selected from the first chapter of this novel.The translation of the text belongs to literary translation. With the guidance of Nida's functional equivalence theory, combined with translation strategies such as literal translation and free translation, i have dealt with the translation of the text from four aspects, such as vocabulary, sentence, paragraph and style to represent the original information, image and the thought to the full extent. Nida points out that translation is to deliver the original information in both meaning and style with proper, natural and equal language. In order to make sure target language readers have similar reading experience with source language readers, the theory outweighs the functional equivalence between two languages rather than the corresponding of each word.This translation report can be divided into five parts besides the English text and the Chinese translation. The first part is the description of the task. The second part tells about the process of translation. The third part is case analysis, which analyzes the difficulties encountered during the process and illustrates the solving methods from lexical and syntactic level based on Nida's functional equivalence translation theory. The fourth part is the summary of the translation practice. And the last part is the expectation of future translation.