Translation Strategy For Economic Documents From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence:a Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Wealth Of Nations

Under the influence of China’s accession to the world trade organization (WTO), China’seconomy and trade are developing rapidly, especially in the field of economic exchanges andcooperation. So the demand of economic translation is also increasing. However, the developmentof related theories lag behind its demand. The research on economic document translation is stillin the primary stage with few related academic theses. In addition, the connection between Chinaand other countries of the world is increasingly close. The economic document translation is themedia for China to understand the world economic development and to communicate with foreigncountries. China has published a lot of economic English books and theses, but some of themhave many translation mistakes.Therefore, under the functional equivalence theory, the study of the translation strategies ofeconomic documents can not only enrich translation theory research, but also meet the demand ofthe reality of the economic document translation. In a word, it‘s of great importance to study theeconomic document translation as the related researches have both theoretical and practical value.The thesis, which is based on the study of The Wealth of Nations—one of the representativework of economic documents, compare Chinese version from Xie Zonglin, Li Huaxia with theother version from Xie Zujun. Combined with the characteristics of the economic documents, thethesis takes Nida’s functional equivalence theory as the guiding theory and translation criteria todiscuss the advantages and disadvantages about handling specific translation problems of theChinese versions, aiming at summarizing several difficulties of economic document translation and discussing the corresponding translation strategies.Through text analysis and comparative analysis, this thesis draw the following conclusions:the characteristics of the economic documents require that translators should pay attention to thereaders’ response to achieve equivalence of meaning and style, and make the receptors of sourcelanguage text and target language text have the similar responses. In the meaning aspect, theauthor analyzes equivalence in three aspects: lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level, andthen accurately grasp the linguistic meaning and professional connotation of the source languagetext. Translators should take the readers’ feelings into consideration, carefully read relevantcultural background knowledge to avoid mistranslation. Translators should also use thecorresponding professional vocabulary, sentence and discourse to accurately reproduce theoriginal information in translation. In the style aspect, translators should keep the style of theoriginal to reproduce the professionalism, accuracy, conciseness and normalization of economicdocuments, which can make the receptors of source language text have the similar response.