A Report On E-CTranslation Of The Innocents:A Story For Lovers Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

The Innocents: A Story for Lovers is the literary work of Sinclair Lewis,who is the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature.His work is a portrayal of American realism.He is adept at using a lot of detailed descriptions and language descriptions to depict American society in a satirical and humorous way.Written in 1917,this novel tells the story of an old couple who love each other and start a tea shop themselves at a holiday resort after their traveling.By describing the story of what happened during the startup process and traveling,the author shapes small-town life in the Midwest.The text is filled with the national cultural features of the United States.Due to the huge differences in language characteristics and cultural background between English and Chinese,how to precisely and correctly convey the meaning and reproduce the stylistic features of the original to the greatest extent will be the one of the difficulties for translator.This report is based on the translation practice of the first six chapters excerpted from the novel The Innocents: A Story for Lovers.Novel translation belongs to the category of literary translation.Literary translation seeks to reproduce the source language in the most appropriate and natural language,so that the source readers and the target readers can get the same reading and emotional experience.And this is consistent with the “receptor's response theory” advocated by Nida.“Functional equivalence” pursues equivalence on languages and cultures,which is a dynamic equivalence.It recommends the translators to use the most authentic translated words to reproduce the information of the source language and attach great importance to the communicative meaning of the language.Literary translation under the guidance of functional equivalence theory breaks the formal constraints of language,which is conducive to highlighting the communicative function of translation.In a word,the functional equivalence theory has certain rationality and applicability in directing literary translation.In the process of novel translation,the guiding role of functional equivalence theory for this paper is reflected in the following three aspects: At the lexical level,as for some common nouns,adjectives,pronouns and cultural-loaded words,the translator tries to find the best corresponding words and strives to achieve lexical equivalence;At the syntactic level,the translator fully considers the readers' responses to ensure the best communicative effect of the translation.At the stylistic level,the author advocates reproducing the original author's humorous and satirical style so that the target readers can get similar reading effects with the original readers and finally achieve stylistic equivalence.