Facilitating Communication In Functional Equivalence

According to Nida, "Difficulties arising out of differences of culture constitute the most serious problems for translation and have produced the most far-reaching misunderstandings among readers." The thesis aims to address negative cultural transfer from which the cultural mistranslations often derive, and to justify the feasibility of Nida's functional equivalence theory in dealing with the transfer.Negative cultural transfer refers to the cultural interference caused by cultural differences, which shows that people subconsciously use their cultural norms and values not only to guide their behaviors and thoughts but also to judge others' behaviors and thoughts. Negative cultural transfer may occur not only in translating a single sound or word, but also in rendering phrases and parts of speech such as subjects, adverbials, etc. More importantly, it finds constant presence in the re-arrangement of discourses, on which translators, both Chinese and English natives, tend to make the most mistakes and have the greatest trouble.The mechanism of negative cultural transfer can be accounted for from a cognitive perspective. During the decoding and re-encoding process of the original information, the association between the message and one's mother tongue is so strongly established that it seems to always downplay the connection between the message and the target language. In other words, the translator tends to appreciate and render the source message based on stratified knowledge stored in their memory. Also, in the translating process, the translators are presumed to look for associations between the source message and the target language and create links between them. That is, whenever a node of information in his brain is touched upon, the whole neural network around the node may be stimulated and activated, but due to the influence of one's native language, the neural network always seems to take the form of his mother tongue and it is always activated ahead of the network connected the target cultural image stored in one's mind if there exists such a connection.FE is expected to overwhelm the negative transfer especially when deep-structure culture is involved in translation, as the equivalence stresses responses on the both parts of readers, readers of original texts and those of translated texts while the negative transfer is characteristic of the carry-over and one-sidedness. In practice, functional equivalence principle proves to be favorable in dealing with redundancy, word order and free translation and therefore in fostering idiomatic and acceptable translation. In this sense the theory is also conducive to increasing understanding and facilitating communication between different cultural groups, while communication helps remove cultural barriers reversely. However, functional equivalence may be disadvantageous as a guiding principle in translating phenomena of surface-structure cultures, for which suggestions are provided at the end of the thesis.