A Practice Report On The Translation Of The Great Wall From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

With the fast growth of economy and thriving development of culture,more and more foreigners show their interests toward Chinese culture.As a bridge of culture communication,the Great Wall carries the important connotation of Chinese culture,and it is the most distinguished representative in Chinese ancient engineering history.The thesis is a practice report which is selected from the book The Great Wall,written by Luo Zhewen(2008),who has researched on the Great Wall for fifty years.The Great Wall is his masterpiece.This book is a historical and geographical monograph,which briefly introduces its history,structure and function with vivid language,and it also lists several representative relics of the Great Wall.This report is aimed to reproduce the connotation and style of the source text,and to achieve the ideal translation result in the framework of the Functional Equivalence theory.The thesis discusses in general two aspects of functional equivalence: the origin and development of functional equivalence and the connotation of the functional equivalence.It analyzes the translation from three aspects: on lexical level,syntactical level and cultural level in regard to the Functional Equivalence theory.A conclusion is drawn at the end of the thesis.On lexical level,the thesis carries out the translation from two aspects:translation of the proper nouns and the transformation of dynamic expressions into static expressions.The thesis divides the terms into five categories: architectural terms,technical terms,specific terms,personal and place names and official titles,and adopts different methods in translation.Based on the functional equivalence,the thesis also discusses the translation methods of the transformation of dynamic expressions into static expressions.On syntactical level,the thesis compares the differences of syntactical rules of the texts and habits of language users.The thesis analyzes the approaches to transform Chinese sentences into English ones which conform to the target language rules.In the translation process,based on the differences between Chinese and English,the thesis adopts appropriate translation methods,such as amplification and omission,combination and division,adjustment of sentence order to achieve functional equivalence on syntactic level.On cultural level,based on the Functional Equivalence theory,the thesis analyzes with cases how to transform the source text which contain Chinese culture into English,and how to let the target readers understand its connotation.Folk tales,folk adages and poems of the source text are the focuses of this part.Finally,the translator makes a conclusion for this practice,which mainly analyzes the findings,problems unsolved and reflections on future practice.Such translation project is not only a process of translation practice but also a process of learning,the author benefits a lot in such translation practice.