A Study Of Functional Equivalence In Translating The Strays:A Case Study

According to Eugene Nida's Functional Equivalence theory,translators are supposed to:convey the message of the source text both naturally and fluently;reproduce its spirit and style;enable the readers of the translated message to understand and appreciate the source text readers' reading experience.The translation of words and sentences is a major difficulty a translator often first encounters when translating a novel.While translating The Strays,I also find it hard to deal with its words and sentences in order to convey their exact meaning.This thesis will then discuss the translation stategies at lexical and syntactical levels.This thesis first introduces Nida's Functional Equivalence theory and analyzes how the core of this theory can be applied to instruct the translation of The Strays at both lexical and syntactical levels.Through translation practice and analysis,the author holds that the translator must perform an adequate comparative analysis of the semantic and grammatical similarities and differences between English and Chinese and then determine the exact meaning of the source text,so as to find the most equivalent and natural Chinese expression.At lexical level,this thesis categorizes translation samples into terms with special connotation and culture-specific terms.It's stated that the translator should not be bounded by the literal meaning of the original term in order to achieve functional equivalence at lexical level.Rather,he/she should add or adjust the meaning of the term on the basis of correct understanding of the information and function the term embodies in the source text.When the term represents an image that can be understood by the Chinese readers,the translator can retain it in translation.At syntactical level,the present author discusses the functional equivalence in translating complex sentences and parallel sentences.Then it is proposed that the translator needs to understand the sentence's syntactical function in the source text and figure out the logic relations within the sentence.Then he/she can decide if there is any need to adjust the sentence structure in Chinese.