A Case Study Of E-C Translation Strategies Of Culture Loaded Terms In Fantasy Novels From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

As a newly published fantasy literature work,A Dance with Dragons(A Song of Ice and Fire Book Five)has won a lot of awards and been widely acknowledged because of its literary and language achievements.Thanks to a fluent Chinese translation version,the classical fantasy novel has gained a huge fame among Chinese readers,therefore this thesis attempts to approach its translation form the perspective of functional equivalence theory that puts emphasis on receptors' reaction.Opinions towards Eugene A.Nida's functional equivalence are divided,yet the author of the thesis believes it is meaningful to study how the theory could be applied to guiding E-C translation of culture loaded terms in fantasy novels.Through the thesis,the author attempts to find out the feature of various translation strategies in dealing with culture loaded terms,and to explore how Nida's theory could be applied to guiding and evaluating E-C translation of culture loaded terms in fantasy literature.Through both qualitative and quantitative analysis,the thesis has three findings.Firstly,this thesis finds that Nida's theory could be applied to guiding and evaluating E-C translation of culture loaded terms in three aspects: his analysis of relations between language and culture lays a theoretical foundation for translatability of culture loaded terms;Nida's way of analyzing grammatical and semantic meanings provides a practical way for evaluating faithfulness;and his standard of equivalence could be adopted to evaluate naturalness of translation.Secondly,accounting for38% of all the culture loaded terms,material culture loaded terms are the most common one in the novel,because the writer described many exotic items to build a whole imaginary world.Religious culture loaded terms carry the heaviest fantasy color because most of fantasy elements like magic and supernatural power are closely connected with religion in the novel.Thirdly,for most of the culture loaded terms in the novel,the translators tend to use literal translation,addition,and adaptation.Transliteration is always combined with other strategies such as addition and literal translation.