The Translation On Biography Under The Functional Equivalence Theory

Biography has a strong literary color,which means it must be true to the life,but it needn’t adhere to the truth rigidly.Without the support of the “historical facts”,biography can no longer exist.However,biography is not the complete record of actual life of someone’s past.In fact,it is an impossible mission even if one tries to to do so.As a kind of literary style,biographical literature must have the common characteristics of literary works.It can be seen that “the real history” and “the reasonable literary creation based on the historical facts”,are the basic conditions for the success of biographical literature accordingly,exerting great influence on translator’s selection of translation strategies in biographical literature.Nida’s theory of functional equivalence emphasizes achieving similar response from both source language reader and target language reader.In order to achieve the similar reader’s response,it is necessary to realize the equivalents of the “Historicity” and “Literariness” of the biography after translation from the original language to the target language.As historicity is the life of biography,it is necessary to translate biographical works as accurately as possible.While the “literariness” requires that the translator transfers literary innovation based on the historicity by retaining the original style and diction.Because of high agreement between the linguistic characteristics of biography and functional equivalence,the author puts functional equivalence into the practice in the translation of Caravaggio.After the research of domestic and overseas literature review,the author explores the translation strategies for biography under the guidance of functional equivalence.By that,the author hopes to find ways to narrow the responding gaps between the source language reader and target language reader from different languages and cultures.At first,the author mainly introduces the research background,research purposes and significance,and the basic structure of the essay.Then,the author comes to the literature review.At last,the author divides the main part of the essay into three parts.Firstly,it introduces the connotation,development and influence of Nida’s functional equivalence theory.Secondly,it gives the analysis of the linguistic features of the biography in the form and function.Thirdly,making a case study of Caravaggio,the author probes into the translation strategies of English-Chinese biography from the perspective of functional equivalence theory and summarizes the findings as follows,making implicit information explicit by realizing the informative function;adding the lost cultural information to achieve stylistic equivalence;enhancing the stylistic equivalence through the realization of the expressive function.