A Report On Academic Text Translation Based On Functional Equivalence

The activity of translation builds a bridge for different countries to communicatewith each other. At present, there is a trend of rapid growth of demand for high qualitytranslation of academic texts. But due to unique features of academic texts, such aspracticability and specialty, the current situation of academic text translation is notoptimistic. For instance, the quality of the academic text translation is not satisfactory;studies of translation strategies of academic texts are mainly confined at lexical level;the academic text translation does not draw enough attention from translation circlesand theoretical studies about it have long been ignored.Based on the current situation of academic text translation and guided by thetheory of functional equivalence, this report, by analyzing the author’s own translationproject of an academic text, endeavors to generalize some useful strategies for academictext translation in order to improve the quality of academic text translation. Thetranslation materials are Chapter9and Chapter12of Translation as a Profession whichgives a comprehensive introduction of the translation industry. Under the guidance offunctional equivalence theory, certain problems regarding vocabulary, sentence structureand context have been solved by analyzing the context and features of the source text indetails and by generalizing some effective translation methods.After analyzing the translation cases, the following findings can be concluded.Great priorities should be given to the response of readers and appropriate translationstrategies should be adopted to guarantee that the receptor’s response is close to that ofthe native speakers and the thought of the academic text is accurately conveyed. Toachieve functional equivalence at lexical level, literal translation and contextualtranslation can be used because there are a number of technical terms, professionalwords and a single word with different meanings in academic works. At syntacticallevel, domestication is the main strategy. The form of the source text needs to bechanged so that the translated version can conform to the expression habit of receptor’s language. Inverse translation, conversion of sentence patterns, sentence splitting andrecombination can be employed to translate the high frequency sentences appearing inacademic works---causality sentences, passive sentences and long complex sentences.At textual level, this report analyzes the differences in the cohesion and coherencebetween English and Chinese languages. In academic text translation, reorganizationand adjustment of cohesive word can be used to achieve functional equivalence.This report, based on functional equivalence theory, generalizes some translationstrategies for academic text translation through analyzing some translation cases fromChapter9and Chapter12of the book Translation as a Profession. It provides somesolutions to the problems appearing in academic text translation and it is helpful andcomplementary to academic text translation and research.