Functional Typology Of Translation And Its Application

Translation has begun from time immemorial, and performed very important functions in human progress. It is also, as American scholar I.A. Richards has claimed, probably the most complex type of event in the history of the cosmos. So, ever since the beginning of translation, translators and scholars have never ceased to dispute over the issues such as the criteria and methods for translation. Since everything is developing, so is the translation practice, and so should be the translation theory. This dissertation is a very attempt to introduce a theory which may be appropriate for the current translation practice, functional typology of translation.As a break with the once prevalent equivalence-based theory, functionalism was developed in 1970's in Germany. Based on action theory, functionalism treats translation as an intentional, interpersonal, partly verbal intercultural interaction based on a source text and gives the intended function of the target text a status to govern the translator's selection of translation strategies and translation methods. Following the tradition of classification in the history of translation and translation studies, Christiane Nord, one of the German functionalists, presented a functional typology of translation. Before the introduction of Nord's functional typology of translation, the author logically reviews the status quo of translation and translation studies which call for a more powerful theory, the classification tradition in history and German functionalism which might have combined to result in Nord's model. After that, the author verifies the feasibility of this model in Chinese-English/English-Chinese translation. In conclusion, the author sums up the procedure of applying the typology and points out the further study to be done.