On The Translation Of News English From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

With the rapid development of the global economy and culture, nations have more and more contact with other nations. In order to meet the requirements of receiving information, News English has became the window of exchanging information around the world. Although English becomes the lingua france, it should be translated and dealt with by the translators because of the different levels of the readers in target language country. Therefore, the English-Chinese translation of newspapers plays an important role in the communication of news. According to the situation, the writer selected articles of The Economist as the translation object, regarded Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory as guidelines, and combined theory with personal experience, to explore how to realize the "Functional Equivalence" at the semantic, syntactic and discourse level respectively.According to Nida, translation consists in producing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent to the message of the source language, first in meaning, and secondly in style, which makes reader’s response to the translation is consistent with the original readers’response to the original. Only translators translating information maximally and accurately can let the readers have the same response as the readers who read the original. So, in the Chinese translation of News English, translators must consider the reader-oriented principle and the principle of information accurately from Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory. Based on these two principles, this paper analyzed the problems about lexical level, syntactic level and textual level in The Economist:in terms of lexical level, the writer proposed different translation strategies such as literal translation, conversion and addition to deal with the proper nouns and terminology and polysemy used frequently in the texts; in terms of syntactic level, to analyze simple expansible sentences, long sentences and passive sentences used frequently in the texts, the writer selected the translation strategies such as order change, synthesization and division to convey information accurately to reach the same readers’ response; in terms of textual level, the writer adopted the translation strategies such as addition, conversion and order change by conducting the links in a paragraph or between paragraphs and representing the entirety of the discourse.This paper firstly analyzes the characteristics of news and basic concept of Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory, on account of which the writer concludes two principles, namely, the reader-oriented principle and the principle of information accurately. Then the writer utilizes the two principles to deal with the semantic, syntactic and discourse problems, which are encountered in the translating of articles from The Economist. During this process, the writer verifies the applicability and guidance of Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory by analyzing its application to the translation practice. Finally, the writer sums up the gains and lessons learned from this translation practice. Through this research, we find that Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory, can effectively guide the translation practice of news, which has the theoretical guiding significance and practical and applied meaning. And that practice has the theoretical and practical meaning in improving the translation quality of this kind of texts.