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4.1.1 Translation of Material Culture-loaded Words

Material culture is the fundamental part of culture, referring to the technology and material products of a culture, including clothing, food, residential architecture, production and transportation tools, daily utensils, and other products of human behavior (Zhang &Ding, 2004). So, the words that can reflect the material culture, we can regard them as material culture-loaded words. For the purpose of helping the target readers to know the material cultural connotation of the words, the author adopts translation techniques including transliteration with a footnote, free translation and amplification in translation task. 

Chapter V Conclusion

5.1 Gains

In terms of Nida’s theory of functional equivalence, the translation of the excerpts from The Man in the Blue Robe was successfully completed. The functional equivalence theory emphasizes that the target text should realize equivalence to the source text as much as possible both in meaning and form and the target reader can appreciate the translation almost the same manner as the original readers read the source text. In the process of translation, the author mainly faced some translation problems, such as the translation of culture-loaded words, sentence patterns of classical Chinese and serial-verb sentences with logical relations, dialogues and symbolic rhetoric. According to the features of the source text, the author adopted proper translation methods and strategies to realize functional equivalence in the target text. 

First, for the translation of culture-loaded words, the author checked many dictionaries and papers to understand the specific meaning and then adopted different techniques such as transliteration with footnotes, free translation, literal translation with footnotes and paraphrase to transfer the source text into English without missing any unique Chinese culture. 

Secondly, in terms of the translation of sentences, due to the different thinking modes and writing habits, the source text contains many elliptical sentences, serial-verb sentences with different relations. When translating these sentences, the author was not only express clearly the literal meaning of every sentence, but also to use amplification or make adjustment so that the translated sentences can be in line with the target readers’ habits.

Thirdly, with regard to discourse level, it is very important to grasp the emotional tone and understand the character’s personalities of the source text for reproducing its style in the target text. Therefore, the author paid more attention on dialogues and symbolic rhetoric. For the translation of dialogues, the author adopted the method of imitating the tones of the characters and reflecting the relationships between the characters to translate the source text in order to achieve the natural equivalence. For the translation of symbolic rhetoric, the author adopted free translation and literal translation express the symbolic meaning to the target readers.

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