On The Translation Of Pharmaceutical Instructions From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

With the intensification of reform and opening-up, and the rapid growth of its economy, China is now in the spotlight of the world. More and more Chinese products find their way in the international market, satisfying the various needs of the foreign consumers. As a treasure of the Chinese traditional culture, Chinese herbal medicine has long been an essential constituent of Chinese products and culture. In recent years, the Chinese pharmaceutical products have attracted worldwide interest and attention. The potential international market is huge and the development prospect is very broad. As an important attachment to the medicine, pharmaceutical instruction has attracted more attention than ever before and the focus is on the quality of translation. However, most of the translations of the instructions are not satisfactory, and as a result, they harm the good image of the products and influence the export of them.The difficulties of translation remain in the differences between the language and culture of the original texts and the target texts. As a special style of technological language, pharmaceutical instructions, both in English and Chinese, have their unique language features, text types, professional content—knowledge of medicine, as well as cultural background, which deserve a comprehensive and systematic study and analysis.In order to provide some theoretical and practical guidance to the translators of pharmaceutical instructions, the author applies Nida's theory of functional equivalence to the research and translation of such materials, identifies the main characteristics of the parallel texts originally written by native speakers of English, analyzes various kinds of problems which appear in the translation, and sums up some approaches to translation which should be equivalent to the functions and scientific information of the source text, and, at the same time, terse, comprehensible, clear and natural for the readership.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One explains the importance of pharmaceutical instructions and the significance and methodology of this research. Chapter Two reviews the recent studies of the translation of instructions achieved by different scholars at home and abroad. The author briefly introduces Nida's theory of functional equivalence and Newmark's functional theory. In Chapter Three the author focuses on the analysis of the language features, structures of English pharmaceutical instructions written by native speakers, which serve as a basis of reference for the translation of Chinese pharmaceutical instructions. Chapter Four analyses and discusses various kinds of problems appeared in the process of translation and Chapter Five brings the theory of functional equivalence as the guide to direct the translation practice. It mainly focuses on word, sentence and text levels. In Chapter Six, a brief conclusion is drawn and some deficiencies of this thesis and direction for further research are pointed out.