A Translation Report On The Lost Child Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

The source text of this translation practice is the foreword and the first chapter of The Lost Child written by the British female writer Julie Myerson.The Lost Child is the last of four non-fiction books by Myerson,which so far has no Chinese translation version.Since its publication,this book has aroused many controversial debates about a "good writer" and a "bad mother" in the western society.However,it is also said that this book is definitely a mother's most sincere and fervent love to her child.Therefore,this book deserves to be translated.Translation of this book can help Chinese readers understand the English culture,especially the children's education and growth problems.Meanwhile,it embodies a series of questions worthy of Chinese readers' exploration and pondering.Based on Eugene Nida's theory of functional equivalence,this paper analyzes typical cases in the foreword and the first chapter of The Lost Child from the lexical level,the syntactic level,the discourse level and the stylistic level,putting emphasis on using translation strategies to convey the source text.Based on the translation practice,this report mainly adopts the method of case study to explore how to convey the original meaning,culture and style accurately to the target language readers under the guidance of functional equivalence theory.There are four major conclusions of the thesis:the translator should focus on how to find the corresponding meaning in target language rather than the direct formal equivalence of every word;the translator should accurately understand the meaning of the source text including its logic and grammatical relations;translators should carefully analyze the internal logical relations between paragraphs according to different contexts and pay attention to the way of thinking of the target language readers so as to achieve equivalence in the text;the translator should maintain the original style of the source text.