E-C Translation Of Business Text From The Perspective Of Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory

The rapid development of economic globalization has brought China more closely to the international community, and consequently, much attention has been paid to the translation of business English. Being the language used to describe commercial activities, business English differs from general English not only in its purpose, but also in the choice of words, sentence structures and textual style. Due to the highly important role it plays in the international communication, plenty of studies have been carried out by translation theorists as well as translators both at home and abroad and many theories have been proposed as the guidance for business English translation. Among them, Nida’s theory of functional equivalence has been highly valued and is deemed as one of the most suitable theories for business English translation.Different from other equivalence theories, Nida’s theory focuses its attention on the relationship between the translated text and the target language readers instead of between original text and the translated one. He distinguishes "formal equivalence" and "functional equivalence" and regards the reader’s response as the true criterion of translation, and a successful translation should trigger the same response from the target language readers as that of the original text readers. According to Nida, functional equivalence refers to the equivalence "first in terms of meaning and second in terms of style". These two criteria of translation have the same effect because when the TL text and the SL text are functionally equivalent both in meaning and style, the responses they get from their readers is bound to be the same or almost the same.In order to prove the applicability of functional equivalence theory to business English translation, the thesis firstly introduces previous studies of equivalence by different translation theorist as well as the current situation of business English translation at home and abroad to provide a general idea of the studies in this field. After that, Nida’s functional equivalence theory is put forward as the theoretical framework of this thesis. Then the language features of business English are summarized from lexical, syntactic, and textual levels. Finally, translation strategies are proposed to achieve functional equivalence in both meaning and style at word level, sentence level, discourse level and culture level. Plenty of examples are employed to prove that Nida’s functional equivalence theory is perfectly suitable for guiding business English translation. The author of this thesis hopes that the study can provide some insight into the translation of business English and provide practical translation strategies to help translators in the process of translating business English.