Translating English Parenthesis From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

The use of parenthesis is a common language phenomenon in English.Scholars both at home and abroad have conducted various studies of English parenthesis.But most of them are carried mainly from semantic and pragmatic perspectives.There are few systematic discussions of translation strategies regarding the E-C translation of parenthesis,even fewer ones that handle public speeches.As a matter of fact,the use of parenthesis in English public speeches is common and has its specific functions.Proper translation of the parenthesis is of great significance to reproduce the speech functions of the original text and thus improve the translation quality of English public speeches.Therefore,based on the translation of William Morris' “The Beauty of Life”,this thesis turns to Eugene Nida for inspiration.His theory of functional equivalence and four basic requirements of translation,namely making sense,conveying the spirit and manner of the original,having a natural and easy form of expression and producing a similar response,offer a stimulating perspective for my study,which aims to explore translation strategies for parentheses of different functions in English public speeches,in the hope of realizing a functional equivalence between the original and translation text.According to the features of a speech text,this thesis first classifies into three kinds the parentheses in the original text in terms of function.They are parenthesis of informative function(including definition type and supplementary & explanatory type),parenthesis of communicative function(including interactive type and view-making type)and parenthesis of connective function(including causal connection,example-giving connection and wording-changing connection).It is against the principle of functional equivalence that this thesis conducts a case study based on thepractice of the E-C translation of Morris' “The Beauty of Life”,arguing that there are different strategies to deal with the E-C translation of English parentheses.One has to confront informative parentheses which include both definition and supplementary or explanatory type in English speeches.A strategy of separation is used to single out an independent sentence in a definition type while a strategy of cutting off & restructuring is chosen for the latter.As for the translation of parenthesis of communicative function,brackets are added to support an interactive type of parenthesis,and parentheses are placed at the beginning of a sentence for a type of view-making parenthesis so as to preserve well the mood and emotion of the original text.For the translation of connective parenthesis,this thesis mainly applies the strategy of putting parentheses at the beginning of a sentence for causal and example-giving connection and the strategy of keeping the original sentence order is used for the wording-changing connection.It is hoped that the analysis and strategies discussed in this thesis can provide both inspirations and methods for future E-C translations of parentheses in English public speeches.