On The Irony Translation In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Jin Di's Equivalent Effect Theory

Irony, a product of different semantic domains' interaction, is a form of expression which can be frequently seen in literary works. The function of irony is to avoid the force on readers to accept the view of the author in the arbitrary or straightforward manner. In order to reflect the plight of human's existence, by the influence of Western existentialism, irony became a way for Qian Zhongshu to express his overall feelings in life. So in Fortress Besieged, Qian Zhongshu circuitously caricatures the object by various techniques to achieve the ironic effects in a more implicit and witty way to make Fortress Besieged a great novel in ironic literature.Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K.Mao translated Fortress Besieged into English in the 1970s. Without much commonness, the culture as well as the language of Chinese and English is distinct in many respects. Accordingly, for the sake of the triumphant version of irony translation, there exists a fair amount of barriers. To the consequence, in the irony translation procedure, the enormous challenge for translators is reproducing the essence of the source text. By its covert techniques as well as prompts, irony activates the readers' appetency of participation. Specifically, in order to capture and recognize its implication, the readers tend to lose themselves in the irony utterances. With the deepened thinking, the readers will have more pleasure. The interpreting of surface meaning is far from enough, thus a successful irony translation should enable the target-text readers get the original effect which is implied in the irony utterance.Theory of equivalent effect, produced by Jin Di, can be regarded as a successful attempt to explore the approach to produce the closest literary translation. And the concept of effect is one of the three concepts produced in this theory. They are the concept of receptor, the concept of effect as well as the concept of equivalence. The concept of effect means that the information transferred by the target text affects the receptor in various ways, such as the experience and feeling of the main spirit, the concrete fact, and artistic imagery. As mentioned above, Jin Di's equivalent effect theory emphasized the relationship between the information and the receptor, thus irony translation in Fortress Besieged can be studied under this theory.This paper explores the translation of irony in Fortress Besieged, from the perspective of Jin Di's equivalent effect theory. It can be found that by the information which involved in ironic utterance the source-text produced several impacts on the readers. That means as for the translation, the affective, critical, humorous, polite or ironic effect on target-text readers should be proximal to the source-text readers. Therefore, this thesis tries to explore the translation of irony under the guidance of equivalent effect theory. Drawing on the essence of this theory, the paper analyzes and comments on the translation of ironies as well as the translation strategies.After the study, it can be found that in the English version, the translators adopt a variety of translation skills: when the original irony utterances can hardly be understood by the Western readers because of inadequate commonness between Chinese and Western culture, by the adoption of proper translation strategies and methods the original concrete fact can be preserved and the original main spirit would be conveyed. Though it takes effort for the target-text readers, after getting the artistic imagery they could understand the culture of the source text better and the impact on them would be approximate to the source-text readers.