A Report On The C-E Translation Of The Ordinary World(Excerpts)

The Ordinary World vividly portrays a series of social contradictions and conflicts during social changes,and portrays many touching characters,showing us the hardships experienced by ordinary people at that time.Since the events depicted happen during a period of social change in the northwestern countryside,the characters’ dialogue is interspersed with a large number of dialects,colloquialisms,and vulgarisms typical of the era.The regional dialect of northern Shaanxi,the vocabulary closely related to politics at that time,the folk songs of northern Shaanxi and the humorous language style together make this book a pleasure to read.It is because the novel is loaded with distinctive language that it poses a great challenge for the translation work.Under the guidance of Nida’s functional equivalence theory,the author tries to make sure that the readers of the translation can obtain basically similar message smoothly from the translated text as the readers of the original do from the original text.The author takes the readable message and reading experience into consideration,so that the target text can also be intriguing and authentic.Though target text cannot be exactly the same as the original text,message can be fully expressed in an acceptable manner.In the part of case analysis,the author deploys lexical level,syntactic level and cultural level to analyse those typical examples.Different aspects of the analysis reveal diverse ways of translating a book replete with rich local culture.For example,some typical idioms used only in northern Shaanxi put the translator on the spot,but similar phrases found in English can make compensations and impress the target readers.Despite difficulties to recreate the original style and retain the culture,the target text is designed to be easily accepted by target readers in ways that make original text look familiar to readers.