In this thesis, the two Chinese versions of Mark Twain’s famous novel the adventures of tom sawyer will be compared and analyzed from the perspective of functional equivalence, aiming to affirm the guidance of the theory for children’s literary translation. One version is translated by Cheng Shi and published by People’s Literature Publishing House; the other is co-translated by Zhu Jianxun and Zheng Kang and published by Yilin Press. This comparative study, carried out under the guidance of functional equivalence theory, is made up of five parts. Part One is an introduction, which mainly presents the motivation of this study. Part Two is a literature review on functional equivalence theory and the translation study of the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Part Three gives a detailed comparative analysis study of the two versions from the level of meaning equivalence, stylistic equivalence and cultural equivalence. A conclusion is drawn in Part Four with some suggestions for further study on children’s literature.源:自'751.·论,文;网·www.751com.cn/

2. Literature Review

Eugene A. Nida is a famous American linguist and translation theorist. His functional equivalence theory has been introduced into China since the early 1990s and has become the most influential one. It pays more attention to the target language readers who are always neglected. The core of his functional equivalence theory is to break the impasse in which the translation is evaluated according to traditional static analysis.

2.1 A Brief Introduction on Functional Equivalence

In Toward a Science of Translating published in 1964, Nida first proposed the concept of dynamic equivalence. Formal equivalence is also introduced in this book. In Nida's point of view, the “formal equivalence” is very rare because different languages vary in form and content. So “dynamic equivalence” is the pursuit of the closest natural equivalence between the target text and source text. In 1969, in Nida’s work From One Language to Another, he started to use the term Functional Equivalence to replace dynamic equivalent. However, there is not much difference between them. Nida described functional equivalence like this: “Basically, dynamic equivalence has been described in terms of functional equivalence．The translation has been defined on the basis that the receptors of a translation should comprehend the translated text to such an extent that they can understand how the original receptors must have understood the original text .” Nida further perfected his theory in the 1990s. In his book Language, Culture and Translating, he pided functional equivalence into different degrees of adequacy from minimal to maximal effectiveness on the basis of both cognitive and experiential factors. 文献综述

The Minimal definition of functional equivalence is “The readers of a translated text should be able to comprehend it to the point that they can conceive of how the original readers of the text must have understood and appreciated it.” The Maximal definition of functional equivalence could be stated as “The readers of a translated text should be able to understand and appreciate it in essentially the same manner as the original readers did”. By proposing the term “the closest natural equivalent”, Nida refers to the ideas as follows: 

(1)  Equivalent, which points toward the source-language message, (2) natural,  which points toward the receptor language and (3) closest, which binds the two orientations together on the basis of the highest degree of approximation.