A Functionalist Approach To Translation Obstacles In Chinese-to-English Specialized Translation And Solutions

With the development of market economy and further open-up of China, specializedtranslation has been seizing an ever increasing market share and gradually replaced literarytranslation as the mainstream of the contemporary translation market in China. However,behind such vibrant development lurk many problems in the specialized translation fromChinese to English, in particular translation obstacles. Based on the practice ofChinese-to-English translation, this thesis examines the various translation obstacles one canexpect in Chinese-English translation and provides an insight into the nature andcharacteristics of these translation obstacles in an attempt to identify the causes to thesedifficulties in linguistic, cultural, social and political terms. Based on the functionalisttranslation theories, the translation theories by Peter Newmark and the FunctionalEquivalence by E.A. Nida, this thesis applies parallel texts for the study of how to solve theaforesaid translation obstacles through two comparative case studies, one of which is based onthe news reports by a Chinese news agency and a British news agency respectively, and theother based on a tourism promotional text. The results show that the translations obtained byusing parallel texts are better accepted by a native speaker of English, thereby verifying theeffectiveness of parallel texts for solving translation obstacles and the applicability offunctionalism to Chinese-English specialized translation.