A Report On E-C Translation Of Rome In The East:The Transformation Of An Empire(Excerpt) Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This report is based on the translation of Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire written by an Australian-born near-eastern archeologist,Warwick Ball.In this book,the writer presents the history of Rome in terms of its obsession with the East through a large amount of historical,architectural,and archaeological evidence.He overturns the traditional idea about the spread of European culture to the East by generating a new perception of the character of Roman civilization and the origin of European identity,and provides readers with a new perspective in understanding the origin of European culture and Eurocentrism.As a historical and archaeological text,it abounds with a wide range of proper nouns,culture-loaded words related to names of historical sites,emperors,religious figures,religions,cults,and so on,and contains a large number of involved sentences.According to Eugene Nida,although each language possesses its distinct characteristics,effective translation among languages can be realized.There is no identical correspondence in translation.The translator,nevertheless,must seek to find the reasonably “closest natural equivalent to source-language message”.He also emphasizes the significance of the receptor’s response and contends that the dynamic relationship between receptor and message should be given the first priority.Taking functional equivalence as the guidance,this thesis attempts to explore how functional equivalence is achieved through applying flexible translating methods such as adding annotations,conversion of part of speech,inversion,amplification,repetition and so on from the following three aspects: the lexical level,the syntactic level,and the textual level so that the target text can be both faithful to the original and consistent with the language rules of Chinese.