A Report On English-Chinese Translation Of Discover China(Excerpts)

The source text is one chapter from a tourist guidebook printed by Lonely Planet, this chapter introduces China's culture in an all around way for foreign tourists better know China. It starts with the modern China, and then it goes back to 4000 years history including the Chinese people, food, arts, religion and landscape. The motive of choosing this tourist text is to better know ourselves in a foreign eye, to discover the cognitive differences and if possible, to do my humble part for foreign publicity.Eugene Nida advanced the functional equivalence theory, he believed that translation should first go to meaning of the text, and then go to the style and functional equivalent information. According to the text type theory raised by Peter Newmark, this chapter falls into the category of the informative text, thus certain translation strategies and methods should be chosen based on Newmark?s theory.This translation process contains a great amount of historical names, geological nouns, architecture terms and menu retroversion. All of the above have to be checked through the internet one by one, and some none-English names brought more difficulties in the translation process. Besides the terms translation, dismemberment and rearrangement of long sentences are also challenging if one attempts to maintain more than the meaning but the style of the source text. This report, based on Nida?s functional equivalence theory and Newmark?s translation strategies, will pursuit the equivalence between source text and target text during translation.