A Report On E-C Translation Of Zen Cho’s Short Fantasy Stories Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This paper is a practice report on the Chinese-English translation of Zen Cho’s fantasy novels.Zen Cho is a Chinese British with a Malaysian family background.Her works contain cultural elements from China,South Korea,Malaysia,and the Great Britain.This collection consists of five short fantasy stories set in sinosphere folklores and myths.The text is characterized by the fusion of modern fantasy literature and ancient mythology,showing multi-culture and fantasy features.During the translation,the main difficulty encountered by the translator lies in how to retain the connotation and charm of the mythological expressions while presenting the multi-cultural fantasy world of the original text to Chinese readers.As there are many differences between Chinese and English in linguistic structures and cultures,there will be some concession in the translation of the form and content.In order to let the target readers have the same reading experience as the source language readers,on the basis of understanding the author’s intention,the translator chooses Eugene Nida’s Functional Equivalence theory as the guidance of translation,with the combination of different translation techniques such as free translation,omission,amplification,transliteration.This paper is composed of five chapters.The first chapter is introduction,elaborating background information of the target text,the entire translation process and the significance of this study.In Chapter Two,it analyzes common features of fantasy novels and unique features of the source text.In Chapter Three,the guiding theory is introduced and the feasibility of its guidance to this translation work is explained.The fourth chapter details the combination of Functional Equivalence theory and the translation practice in several cases from four aspects: Chinese mythic expressions,foreign cultural expressions,science fictional neologisms and the reporting verbs.The last chapter is Conclusions,summarizing experience on this translation practice under the guidance of Functional Equivalence theory and limitations of the study.