A Report On Figures Of Speech Translation Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Literary translation has a long history in the West,which can be dated back to 250 BC when a Roman,livius andronicus,translated Homer's Epic Odyssey with Latin.In contrast,literary translation in the East originated from 1 BC.Although literary translation has a long history in China and even the world,the translation of modern philosophical novels in modern China is much less.The main reason is that the philosophical novels are recondite and some of them are difficult to translate.Once the translator cannot understand the main idea that the author wants to express,the quality and elegance of the translation cannot be guaranteed.This is a translation practice report based on the short novel Ishmael.The author is Daniel Quinn who is an American.The Philosophical novel Ishmael was published in 1992 and the length of the original text is about 30,000 words.Extracting 7000 words from the novel,the translator wrote this translation practice report.Under the guidance of the theory of Functional Equivalence,the translator used a variety of translation methods such as: Literal Translation,Free Translation,Domestication and Foreignization and also used Amplification Method,Omission,Combination and Word Order Adjustment in order to achieve the standard of Faithfulness,Expressiveness and Elegance.Functional Equivalence is also known as Dynamic Equivalence.Eugene Nida,an American linguist,clearly defined “Dynamic Equivalence” in The Theory and Practice of Translation: Dynamic equivalence is therefore to be defined in terms of the degree to which the receptors of the message in the receptor language respond to it in substantially the same manner as the receptors in the source language.(Nida,E.,& Taber,C.,2004)Nida was taught by several famous linguists researching in structuralism and had served in the 33 th American Bible Society for more than half a century.His main academic activity throughout his life was that he had centered on the translation of the Bible.In the process of translation of the Bible,Nida developed a set of his own translation theories in the actual situation.His translation eventually became one of the classic works."Ishmael" is the representative work of the author,Daniel Quinn.The book runs through the author's religious thoughts.This undoubtedly bring a lot of difficulties to the translator.The translator used case analysis to list figures of speech appeared in the novel,such as metaphor,simile,hyperbole and transferred epithet and used examples to illustrate the instructional effect of Functional Equivalence in figures of speech translation and finally she offered some solutions.