The Translation Of Employee Handbook Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence

Functional equivalence was put forward by Eugene Nida, a pioneer in the fields oftranslation theory and linguistics. In the1980s, the theory was introduced into China,which led to a “Nida phenomenon” and hence China’s translation study is developingtoward maturity. Under the guidance of functional equivalence, the translated versionshould be the closest natural equivalent to the source language message.The source text is an employee handbook named “PIC Sample Company PoliciesAnd Procedures”. As an informative text, this handbook features large amount ofinformation, numerous complicated sentences and English idiomatic expressions, andhence, to reproduce a natural Chinese text is indeed a tough task. Nida’s functionalequivalence theory emphasizes information transformation and target readers’ response,which turns out to be in accordance with the requirements in translating the employeehandbook. Therefore, it is practical and feasible to apply the theory in the translation ofthe handbook. Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory, some appropriatetranslation strategies have been adopted to produce an excellent translation.The report, based on the introduction of functional equivalence and the analysis ofthe text type of the source text, has mainly discussed the translation of the employeehandbook under the guidance of functional equivalence, and especially analyzed theapplication of the theory in the translation of tones, idiomatic expressions and stylisticfeatures.