Prose Translation Strategy Study from Chinese to English from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence

Abstract

Prose works boast rich cultural connotation, loose structure, free form of expression. There are great cultural differences between Chinese culture and West culture; English pays attention to hypotaxis and strictly obeys the grammatical expression norms. Achieving complete equivalence between the original text and the translated text when translating Chinese prose works into English is difficult. Nida's functional equivalence theory emphasizes that grammatical accuracy and literal corresponding should not be attached great importance in translation but that the reaction of the readers to the translation should be essentially like that of the original readers, which effectively reduces the conversion between the source language and target language of objective standard and furthest achieves functional equivalence between the original text and translated text and effectively solves the problems in the process of prose translation. Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory, four strategies for prose translation from the lexical, syntactic, discourse and stylistic levels are proposed in this paper, which are lexical transformation, sentence structure changing, constituent addition, holistic consideration.