A Study On The Chinese-English Translation Of Publicity Literature: Applying Functional Equivalence Theory From A Cultural Perspective

With China deepening its reforms and opening policies, its overseas publicity is receiving ever-increasing concern and developing at an unprecedented speed in the fields of diplomacy, economy, business, culture and tourism. In each field, Chinese-English (often referred to as "C-E") publicity literature translation plays a significant and irreplaceable role in publicizing China to the world. Publicity materials have their peculiarities and are designed to carry out special functions. They are intended to inform foreign readers of China's political, economic and cultural situation, to express our attitudes toward international affairs, and to promote their understanding and support for our modernization drive. This paper sets out to clarify the practical significance of publicity literature translation, analyze the current problems that exist in the field of C-E publicity literature translation, explore the causes of the problems from both linguistic and cultural aspects, and to seek answers to the problems by applying Nida's functional equivalence theory from a cultural perspective. The effects of publicity we can achieve largely depend upon the quality of the translation of publicity materials. Due to the distinctive features and functions of publicity materials, this paper adopts as particularly appropriate Nida's functional equivalence theory for C-E publicity literature translation, which should be target-language-culture-oriented. This is to search for expressions acceptable to target culture to produce clear translated versions with the equivalent effects on the source language readers and the target language readers alike. Therefore, Nida's theory can be fully exploited as a way of achieving expected cross-cultural communication effects in translation with linguistic and cultural conflicts minimized.