A Political Text Translation Report Based On Functional Equivalence Theory

As economic globalization becomes a trend of world’s economic development, theexchange and cooperation with other countries is becoming more and more widely spread.As a developing country, China is attaching great importance on making the outside worldbetter understand herself and political events undoubtedly serves as one of the mosteffective ways to reinforce and strengthen such understanding. Translation plays animportant role in the intercultural exchange, thus the translation of political text is of vitalimportance.Based on Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory (to be abbreviated as NFT), thisreport adopts Premier Wen Jiabao on Education as material for my own translationpractice. The aim of this report is to make a probe into the proper translation methods ofpolitical texts by analyzing the content and style of the text and studying on the difficultiesand problems in the process of translation, thus to improve the author’s translating skills.The author launches the project from cultural level, lexical level and syntactical levelunder the guidance of FET for sake of probing proper translation methods. Altogether, theauthor summarizes seven translation methods: literal translation, free translation, deletion,transposition, rearrangement, addition and combination. Literal translation and freetranslation are mostly used at cultural level. As for lexical level, deletion and transpositionmethods are widely applied to the translation. At the syntactic level, addition,rearrangement and combination methods are available.The author gains a lot of experience in political translation and improves thetranslation skills of political texts through the translation practice. Also, the author hopesthat it will be helpful to the future translation practice on political translation.