Translation Of English Philosophical Texts From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

With the rapid development of cultural diversity, countries who want to advance their people’s civil quality must constantly introduce others’outstanding cultural works and thoughts. Philosophy, as a science, exerts specific significance on the blossom of not society but human beings themselves. Chinese philosophical thoughts embrace a history of thousands of years and need to be enriched through communicating with foreign excellent thoughts under the background of globalization. In such a process, translation plays a prominent role in spreading new thoughts. However, the obscurity and abstract of philosophy as well as the differences between Chinese and English bring the translators a big challenge. It requires them to improve their translation capacity and acquire more philosophical knowledge in order to help Chinese scholars to study foreign eminent philosophy and learn new thoughts.Functional Equivalence Theory is selected to be a theoretical base of this translation practice. The theory emphasizes functional equivalence from words to semantic meaning between the source text and the target text. It improves the philosophical text with more accurate and smooth translation so as to tightening the relation of theory and practice.The selected translation material is an article published in Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy. The article is named as Kant’s Philosophy of Religion, written by three scholars who studies Kant’s philosophy. It is accomplished in English with approximate 16 thousand words and has not yet rendered in Chinese. The thesis, based on the Functional Equivalence Theory, introduces the process of the completion of this translation task, discusses and analyzes the translation process through the philosophical terms, complex sentence structures and logical constructions and finally puts forward corresponding translation strategies. At present, few reports or theses can be found at home about studying on philosophical text. Therefore, through practice and analysis, the author aims to summarize the principles and methods, providing beneficial reference for the research and practice of English-Chinese translation of philosophical text.