C-E Translation Of The Feasibility Report Of A Coal Chemical Construction Project Based On Functional Equivalence

In recent years, with the rapid development and the globalization of economy, more and more international engineering cooperation projects have surged up, which has greatly stimulated the development of Chinese-to-English translation in this field. Translation of those engineering project documents plays a critical role in the approval of a proposed project by the foreign investors and decision-makers. For this reason, the thesis attempts to study how to translate engineering project documents for the purpose of winning the investor or decision-makers’ approval of the project.This is a piece of thesis on the basis of a C-E translation practice, with the source text coming from a report on the feasibility of a coal chemical construction project. As the expected function of the target text is a very important factor that the translators should take into consideration in the process of translation, the whole thesis selects Nida’s Functional Equivalence as the guidance of the translation, and mainly explores the problems and their corresponding solutions in the process of translation. Furthermore, the author sums up several suggestions for the translation of engineering project document in the future. The thesis is started with a detailed source text analysis from the background of the translation task and the linguistic features of the feasibility report. Features in words and phrases, sentences and text style are analyzed in detail. Next, the theoretical basis, Nida’s Functional Equivalence, is introduced briefly. According to Nida’s Functional Equivalence, the equivalence is firstly studied in terms of meaning, and secondly in terms of style. With semantic equivalence, equivalence in style and equivalence of communicative effect as the core of Functional Equivalence, the author categorizes the problems in the first draft of translation into the violation of equivalence in meaning, disobedience of equivalence in style and failure in achieving equivalence of communicative effect, which are illustrated with some typical examples in the translation task. Based on these aspects of problems, and under the guidance of Nida’s Functional Equivalence theory, the author applies semantic equivalence and stylistic equivalence to lexical level, syntactical level and textual level for the purpose of producing the closest and natural equivalent translation and achieving equal communicative effect. Specifically, methods such as literal translation, literal translation plus explanation, conversion, omission in word level, adjustment of word order, sentence combining and adjustment of tense and voice in sentence level, and familiarizing background knowledge, adoption of appropriate text style in textual level are adopted. With problems being found and solved, the author makes a summary on the specific methods for the problems, and makes a conclusion on how to use this thesis to guide the translation of similar texts and how to achieve natural and closest equivalence.