Abstract
Museums play an important role in China’s communication with the world and demonstrate to some extent China’s soft power. As China further strengthens its international exchanges, more and more people hope to know China through its history and culture. However, due to the lingual and cultural distinctions, there are many unavoidable problems in translating Chinese relic texts (Source Text or ST) into English texts (Target Text or TT). As Eugene Nida said in his functional equivalence theory, the Target Reader’s (TR) comprehension and appreciation of the translation is significant. Therefore, in translating relic texts, attention should be paid to how the TR can understand and accept the content. This thesis aims at finding proper translation principles and methods by analyzing the translations of the relic texts in Hubei Provincial Museum from the perspective of the core concepts of functional equivalence theory. Through a study on the functional equivalence theory, the thesis finds three principles of translating relic texts: accuracy, readability and acceptability. An analysis of the relic texts of Hubei Provincial Museum has led to several translation methods including addition, omission, paraphrasing and rewriting, which help to achieve the functional equivalence of relic texts translation.
Highlights
The Moon and Sixpence was written by the renowned British novelist William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) and published in 1919, right after the First World War
Whether and how narrative tense can be transferred from the source text to the target text should be critically factored into the translation process, which bears much on the rhetorical effect of fictions
Three examples regarding “underreading” of the narrator‟s unreliability and two examples regarding the flexible use of narrative tense will be selected and examined from these two aspects in detail, guided by two research questions: (1) At the discourse level, to what extent are the stylistic markers of the two narrative techniques reproduced in the two translated versions?
Summary
The Moon and Sixpence was written by the renowned British novelist William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) and published in 1919, right after the First World War. The story is narrated by the first-person homodiegetic narrator “I”, a biographer, who records the protagonist‟s life via recalling his only a few encounters with him as well as interviewing the persons who once came into contact with him, in an attempt to determine his real nature and unveil his ultimate motivation of the painter dream In this novel, Maugham touches upon the theme of inexplicable human nature and soul searching, an epitome of the postwar social instability as well as the uncertainty of human cognition. In order to effectively interweave these themes with the story plot and characterization, the author ingeniously adopts two distinctive narrative techniques, namely, unreliable narration and a flexible use of narrative tense. He successively translated a wide range of classic works like The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby and The Little Prince (the only official Chinese version approved by the Foundation Saint-Exupéry of France in 2015), most of which seem to be positively embraced by the younger generation
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