A Practice Report On Webpage Translation Of Amazon Digital Devices From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This practice report focuses on the content of webpages of Amazon China's official website amazon.cn. It is based on the webpage translation program in which the author participated as an intern. The project is designed to mainly translate the content of help pages of Amazon digital devices including Fire tablets and Kindle e-readers. In the translation program, some problems are found on the existing pages such as unnatural language of digital device instructions. With an analysis of these problems in the translated content, the author puts these problems into two categories: word-for-word translation and failure to meet customers' demands. These problems indicate that there are no systematic and categorized translation techniques being used in previous translation. Since Nida's functional equivalence theory emphasizes that translation consists in reproducing the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message in the receptor language, it can be used as guidance of webpage translation as one of its major purposes is to convey natural and understandable information to readers. Based on Nida's four principles of producing functional equivalence, translation techniques for webpage translation are presented in this report, including lexical changes, obscurity avoidance, semantic and syntactic changes, form and formality adjustment, and punctuation usage. This report is expected to provide suggestion for further study of webpage translation.