Abstract

In the translation of literary classics, re-translation is a very common practice.  Sister Carrie is one of representatives from American writer Theodore Dreiser. He reveals the cruelty of the American capitalist system to the poor people and the corrosive nature of the bourgeois lifestyle to the petty bourgeoisie. This paper compares two renditions of the novel, by Qiu Zhuchang and Bin Yu respectively, clarifying their different translation strategies at word, sentence and discourse levels. Based on the text analysis, the author argues about the necessity of re-translation of the literary classics.

Key words: functional equivalence, retranslation, Sister Carrie

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1. Introduction-1

2. Literature Review-2

2.1 Researches on Sister Carrie and its Chinese renditions-2

2.2 An overview of the functional equivalence theory-4

3. A comparative study of two renditions of Sister Carrie-5

3.1 Lexical equivalence regarding costume names-6

3.2 Syntactical equivalence of simple sentence translation-7

3.3 Discourse equivalence in rendering psychological activity-9

4. Necessity of Re-translation-10

5. Conclusion-11

Reference13