摘要：小说《师傅越来越幽默》是中国著名作家莫言为数不多的反映城市生活的代表作，全文将讽刺与黑色幽默相融合。《师傅越来越幽默》的英译版作者是葛文浩，是莫言作品的首席翻译家。本文将从奈达提出的功能对等翻译理论出发，以莫言的《师傅越来越幽默》和葛文浩的英译版为研究对象，根据作者和译者各自的创作风格特点、文化背景等，根据词意对等、句意对等、篇章对等这三个方面，通过翻译例子对原著和译文的比较，分析译文和原文表意的异同点，探索译本翻译的妙处，旨在为类似文本的翻译提供翻译参考。

关键词  师傅越来越幽默 文体风格  功能对等  翻译分析

毕 业 论 文 外 文 摘 要

Title  On Translation of Shi-fu，You’ll Do Anything for a  Laugh From the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory                                         

Abstract：Shi-fu，You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh, a masterpiece of Chinese famous writer Mo Yan, is one among the few of his works that reflects the urban life mixed with satire and black humor. The writer of its English version is Howard Goldblatt, who is the best translator of Mo Yan’s works. This study, based on Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory and taking the original Chinese novel and Howard Goldblatt’s English translation as the data, will take the cultural background and translator’s style into consideration, focus on the lexical equivalence, syntactic equivalence and textual feature equivalence, compare similarities with specific examples and expression of meaning so as to analyze and discuss the beauty of Howard Goldblatt’s version, offering translation reference for similar textual translation.

Keywords  Shi-fu，You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh  stylistic feature  functional equivalence   translation analysis 

Table of Contents

1  Introduction 1

1.1  About Shi-fu，You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh 1

1.2  About the Style of Shi-fu，You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh1

  2  Literature Review 3

2.1  Previous Studies on Functional Equivalence  3

  2.2 The Relationship Between Stylistic Features and Functional Equivalence4

  3  Equivalent Analysis on the Translation of Shi-fu，You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh5

  3.1 Equivalence on Lexical Level  5

3.2 Equivalence on Syntactic Level  6

3.3 Equivalence on Textual Level  7

Conclusion 9

Acknowledgments  10

References 11

1  Introduction

1．1  About Shifu，You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh

Shifu，You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh is the first novella collection of Mo Yan．His passion for writing shaped by his own experience of almost unimaginable poverty as a child, Mo Yan uses his talent to expose the harsh abuses of an oppressive society. And it was translated into English by the famous translator Howard Goldblatt and published in America, which receives a good response.

Masterfully translated by Howard Goldblatt, this story is shrewd, ironic, unfailingly compassionate rendering of all the beliefs one must entertain and all the things one must forget in order to survive. In this story, the strongest piece in this perse work, Ding Shifu, an industrious “grade-seven worker,” is laid off just weeks away from retirement. Appalled but inspired by the introduction of paid toilets in his town (“Whoever heard of having to pay to use a toilet?” (MoYan, 203)), he turns an abandoned bus into a money-making love shack for courting couples, furbished with condoms and cold drinks. All goes well until the last customers of the season appear: they may or may not have carried out a suicide pact inside the bus. Ding Shifu can't bring himself to look. This Schroedinger's Cat of short story renders its own paradox of indeterminacy: if the lovers are dead, how will he dispose of the bodies without getting into trouble with the local government? And if they are ghosts, they come to express their disapproval that anyone should have to pay for love. This bureaucratic farce is also a fable filled with supernatural dread.