A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of The Last Good Country

This is a report on the English-Chinese translation of Ernest Hemingway's short story,The Last Good Country,which is taken from The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.The Last Good Country is chosen for the source text for this translation practice in that Hemingway's short stories,compared with his novels,have been more likely to be ignored in China for a long time.In fact,Hemingway's short stories are of great research value.The story mainly describes an escape resulting from an illegal hunting,and the protagonists,Nick and his sister,are helped by many people during the escape.The relationships between these people gradually unfold with the further development of the story line.The story reveals Hemingway's typical concision and objectivity in writing,and the characters' image is mainly manifested through rich dialogues with less involvement of the author's emotion.Based on this,functional equivalence theory is taken as theoretical guidance of this translation practice,in order that target readers can gain the feelings as close as possible to that obtained on original readers.Based on Eugene Nida's translation practice of Bible,he puts forward functional equivalence theory.The core concept of functional equivalence theory is dynamic equivalence,which mainly contains three layers of implications:equivalent message,natural language and closest meaning.Dynamic equivalence requires that the total meaning and content of a discourse should be reproduced in a natural way in the target language as much as possible.Therefore,this translation report will give details about how the functional equivalence theory applies in this translation practice from character description,environmental description and writing style this three parts.The report focuses on the description of the English-Chinese translation process of The Last Good Country and it is composed of four chapters.Chapter One introduces the source,purpose and requirements of the translation task and the structure of this report.Chapter Two concerns the description of the translation process:preparation of translation,translation process and issues after translation.Chapter Three presents the problems and the theory application in the translation by the case studies.Chapter Four summarizes the experiences learned from the translation task.To sum up,this translation practice is a process of systematically and flexibly applying the translator's knowledge and improving the ability of self-reflection,which benefits the translator a lot.The report is expected to provide some experiences for those who will work on translating short stories of Ernest Hemingway.