A Report On The Translation Of The Fall Of Gondolin(Excerpts)

The report is based on the translation practice of The Fall of Gondolin by J.R.R.Tolkien,including the Preface,Prologue,the excerpt of Chapter One “The Tale of the Fall of Gondolin”.As the first real story of Tolkien's imaginary world,The Fall of Gondolin tells the destruction of the hidden elvish city Gondolin by Morgoth,happening after a man Tuor's arrival during the Second Age,because elves in Gondolin neglect Tuor's warning of Morgoth.There mainly exist three challenges during the process of translation: firstly,some Chinese readers are already familiar with several proper names in this book,and different Chinese translations of those names have previously been published in Tolkien's other books;secondly,Tolkien employed coined words and languages in this book,and one person's name can be spelled differently in diverse languages;thirdly,Tolkien sometimes employed Middle English spelling or classical writing style,and he even wrote a poem for ancestors of elves.The report consists of four parts: Chapter One introduces the translation task;Chapter Two describes the process of translation;Chapter Three is Case Study;the Conclusion summarizes the translator's personal reflections.The case study of the translation is conducted under the guidance of the functional equivalence theory,which is developed in four aspects.First,to achieve functional equivalence at the lexical level,the translator divides all the proper names and coined words collected in the material into two parts: those appeared in published Chinese books and those not,then the translator respectively deals with them by literal translation and transliteration to achieve functional equivalence,also the four-character Chinese words are employed.Second,to achieve functional equivalence at the syntactic level,the translator reinvents sentence restructures on one hand,follows the original syntactic structure on the other hand.Third,to achieve functional equivalence at textual level,the translator uses parallelism and repetition,rhyme and alliteration to help the translation of poems.Fourth,to achieve functional equivalence at the stylistic level,the translator adopts the classical Chinese to represent the classical style of discourses written in Middle English in the source text.