A Functional Equivalent Approach To The Translation Of Numerical Idioms In The Story Of The Stone

As the crystallization of human wisdom and the essence of language,Idioms are very expressive.Any successful literary work takes its language as a means of expression.Therefore the Chinese classic The Story of the Stone,which features natural and plain language that involves rich numerical idioms and reflects the traditional folk culture,is no exception.This paper takes the original texts of The Story of the Stone and its English versions by Yang Hsien-yi,Gladys Yang,David Hawkes and John Minford as corpus.Based on Nida's theory of functional equivalence,the contrast analysis was carried out between these two versions from two dimensions of translation methods and strategies on the numerical idioms,so as to explore the differences between and the extents to which the functional equivalence was achieved respectively.The study found that: 1)According to the number of words,the numeral idioms in The Story of the Stone can be simply divided into four types: two-character case,three-character case,four-character case and short sentence.2)Numeral idioms are rarely used to actually count,but in most cases,they are used for the reference to semivagueness and vagueness,and in particular,they are often used to represent sorting,ambiguity,emphasis,exaggeration,action connection,metaphor,and culture loading.3)Both Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang as well as Hawkes and Minford had achieved functional equivalence to some extents in the translations of the numerical idioms in The Story of the Stone,while Hawkes and Minford performed better on the translations of culture-loaded numerical idioms.4)The translation methods adopted by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang as well as Hawkes and Minford are relatively consistent in terms of the numerical idioms with vague and exaggerated functions,while quite different as regard to those with metaphorical and culture-loaded functions.This is particularly significant in the culture-loaded numerical idioms.5)The translators' choices of translation methods depend on their translation strategies.Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang adopted the foreignization strategy,while Hawkes and Minford adopted the domestication strategy.Different translation strategies reflect the translators' different translation purposes.