A Report On The English Translation Of Young Qi Baishi(Chapter 4) From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This is a report of translation.The source text is selected from the book Young Qi Baishi,written by Chen Yunqiu.It is a biography that vividly presents the youth life experience of Ah Chi(Qi Baishi)in a popular and clear way.The translation practice takes the fourth chapter of it as the source text,which is about 17,400 words.This chapter focuses on describing Qi Baishi's short experience in school.During this period,he showed his love for life,his passion and talents for art.The text has quite distinctive features in language expression.In vocabulary,there are many Chinese cultural words and dialect words in the book;in sentences,it has many sentences without subjects and clauses without conjunctions;the discourses in the book are mainly connected in a chronological or logical order in which the words or actions occur,lacking of cohesive devices often used in English;in style,the ancient poetry and folk adages are used interchangeably with the popular spoken language.According to the above characteristics,the translator,guided by Functional Equivalence Theory in the process of translation practice,and not constrained by the language form,flexibly uses various translation strategies and techniques,and strives to create a translation that conforms to both the original semantics and the original cultural characteristics.This translation report is based on the translation of the fourth chapter of Young Qi Baishi.It takes the whole process of translation activities as the main line.It describes the background,significance and content of the translation practice task,the specific process of translation practice.It introduces the guiding theory of this translation task--Functional Equivalence theory.And in the report,cases analysis is conducted from the four levels of functional equivalence,lexical equivalence,syntactic equivalence,textual equivalence and stylistic equivalence,to explain how to use the corresponding translation strategies and techniques from the perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory so as to achieve the equivalent effect as far as possible between the original text and the target text in literary translation.After analysis,it is showed that Functional Equivalence Theory has certain guiding significance for literary translation.Under the guidance of this theory,the translation can reproduce the information of the source language from semantics to stylistics with the most appropriate,natural and equivalent language.Through this translation practice,the translator believes that in addition to basic theoretical knowledge and translation skills,translators need to be familiar with the culture of the two languages in order to better narrow the understanding bias caused by cultural differences between the original text and the translation.