A Report On The Translation Of Where The Crawdads Sing(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

The source text of the report is selected from the novel Where the Crawdads Sing written by American writer Delia Owens.Translation of novels belongs to the category of literary translation,which requires the target text to both convey the meaning of the original text and reflect its style as much as possible so as to evoke in the receptors responses substantially equivalent to those experienced by the original receptors.It is precisely what Eugene Nida's functional equivalence theory talks about.In the process of translating the chapters 36-49,many difficult parts are handled under the guidance of functional equivalence,which plays an important role in helping me solve these problems.The profound novel is subtle in expression and elaborate in description,through which readers get immersed into the natural world of the novel.The translator tries to represent its meaning and stylistic charm,and produces a translation of functional equivalence.The difficult problems in the process of translating could be categorized into four aspects: words with their contextual meanings and idioms,long and complicated sentences,metaphors and characters' language.The writer,from the perspective of functional equivalence theory,analyzes these problems,provides solutions,and hence summarizes some workable translation strategies.At the lexical level,translators should pay attention to precise meanings of words in specific contexts and effects,rather than literal meanings,of idioms.At the syntactic level,translators sometimes need to restructure sentences in view of differences in ways of organizing ideas between English and Chinese.At the level of figures of speech,especially about metaphor translation,translators could add annotations or explanatory information in the text based on their judgments about whether receptors of English and Chinese share the same cultural experiences or not.At the level of communicative effect,translators should try to represent the original tone and reflect characters' relationship,so as to achieve consistency in portraying characters.The translation report,under the guidance of functional equivalence,analyzessome examples selected from the translation of the chapters 36-49 of the novel Where the Crawdads Sing and summarizes several translation strategies to discuss the applications of functional equivalence theory in literary translation,which is expected to be inspirational for the future theoretical study and practice of literary translation.