Published: October 31, 2025
Article history: Updated on June 26, 2026
Abstract
Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is an important famous work in world literature. It tells the story of a poor orphan named Oliver, who was born into bad luck in 19th-century England, and how his life was full of sadness but ended with redemption. The book shows clearly how much Oliver suffered in workhouses, how he got mixed up with a group of criminals after he was taken away, and how he finally found a better life. At the same time, it sharply points out the unfair social systems, wide poverty, and bad moral conditions of that time. This paper uses Eugene Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory as a guide, and it does a full comparison of two well-known Chinese versions of Oliver Twist, translated by Rong Rude and He Wen’an. The paper looks closely at the translation strategies the two translators used in four main areas: how they handle word meanings, how they adjust sentence structures, how they keep the text connected, and how they pass on cultural information. It pays special attention to how the translators deal with moving meanings, language functions, and cultural ideas between English and Chinese. This study is really useful for people who want to understand literary translation. It shows how Functional Equivalence Theory works in real practice when you need to connect language and cultural differences. It also helps people see how hard it is to translate classic literary works, these works that have deep social themes and meanings. And it gives real useful ideas for translators who want to find a good balance between staying true to the original text and making the work easy for target readers to understand. In the end, this research helps to make the methods used in translation studies richer, and it helps spread classic literature and make cross-cultural communication work better between different groups.
References
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How to cite this paper
A Contrastive Study of Translation Strategies for Oliver Twist from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory—Exemplified by the Rong and He Translations
How to cite this paper: Sanyuan Shi. (2025). A Contrastive Study of Translation Strategies for Oliver Twist from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory—Exemplified by the Rong and He Translations. Translation and Foreign Language Learning, 1(3), 453-457.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.10.010