A Translation Report On The Good Daughter(Excerpt) Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Written by the American crime novelist Karin Slaughter,The Good Daughter is a suspense novel that narrates a story of love and redemption.28 years ago,Samatha Quinn and Charlotte Quinn's happy life was completely ruined by an attack,and their life was filled with sorrow.28 years later,they came back to the town for revenge to uncover the secret after that tragedy.The translator excerpted the epigraph and one section of chapter 17 as the sotrce text of translation practice,and wrote this report on the basis of it.The source text is a suspense novel,and it involves a great deal of details,scenes,portrait of various characters with dramatic and fascinating plots.Therefore,it has a high quality requirement for the target text.Under the guidance of Eugene A.Nidats functional equivalence theory,the translator analyzes the translation skills with specific examples at the lexical level,the syntactic level and the rhetorical level in this translation report.At the lexical level,the source text involves a lot of delicate words,colloquial expressions and cultural information.Therefore,the translator uses the translation skill of amplification and conversion to enhance reader's understanding for the target text.At the syntactic level,the sentence structures of the source text are complex and variable with rigorous logic,including the main clauses,subordinate clauses and the appositive clauses.Therefore,the translator uses the translation skill of division,combination and restructuring to translate the English sentences into Chinese sentences that conform to Chinese thinking pattern.At the rhetorical level,the source text contains various rhetorical devices such as similes,metaphors,parallelisms and personifications,which makes the text language vivid.Therefore?the translator uses the methods of reservation of images and omission of images to help readers understand meaning and context of the source text.In the end,the translator makes a summary for this translation practice.From the translation of The Good Daughter,she has accumulated translation skills and has gained experience.However,due to inadequate practice under the guidance of translation theory,the translator cannot yet skillfully apply various translation skills in combination with linguistic features,which results in some rigid and awkward translation.Therefore,the translator hopes this report could provide some reference for other translators of suspense novels.