Functional Equivalence In E-C Screenplay Translation

Nowadays, many foreign movies, most of which come from the United States and the United Kingdom, enter into the movie market of China. Movies have turned into not only a medium of entertainment but also a medium of communication. It's an urgent task to translate the English movies into Chinese in order to make it possible for the Chinese audience to appreciate them. However, screenplay translation is far from being satisfactory since the study of screenplay translation has not been attached enough importance to. It seems that there's no dominant theory guiding the movie translators.The author intends to analyze how Nida's theory of Functional Equivalence can serve as a criterion that instructs a movie translator to make a better translation and solve some problems he is confronted with. In this paper, chapter one makes an introduction to Nida's theory of "Functional Equivalence" and why the author applies Nida's theory to screenplay translation. Chapter two is about the characteristics of screenplay translation and the constraints of screenplay translation. The following chapters elaborate how "functional equivalence" serves as a criterion in the movie translation from three aspects: stylistic equivalence, aesthetic equivalence and pragmatic equivalence. Chapter five draws aconclusion of this paper: the success of film translation should be evaluated by the criterion that the relationship of the target language audience to the translated film should be as close as possible to the relationship of the source language audience to the original film.