A Study On Translation Of International Express Terms And Conditions From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

International Express Terms and Conditions,also known as “Service conditions”,is a contract between companies and customers.Its major content plays a great part in preventing and avoiding the risks existing on the transportation and delivery,especially under the occasion of natural disasters,man-made damages or obligation disputes,which aims at dealing with potential responsibilities and interest problems.Although international Express Terms and Conditions is a two-party contract,it touches upon three sides’ benefits,that are the express company,the shipper and the consignee respectively.Once goods are transported and shipped by air,sea or road,this Terms and Conditions take effect,which will not terminate the contract until clients receive the goods.In order to completely make sure of that the insurance policy and guarantee work being implemented before the cargo is transported,Express Terms and Conditions lays a solid foundation for a successful delivery.This study regards international International Express Terms and Conditions as the research objects,which are released from the official websites of DHL,UPS,TNT and FED.After collecting the data,a bilingual corpus of Express Terms and Conditions is built with following steps.The first step is to use Treetagger to attach a special code on each word.Then,the second step is to retrieval words WordSmith that has three main functions,namely Concord(context co-occurrence retrieval tool),Word List(word list retrieval tool)and KeyWords(keywords retrieval tool).Lastly,it counts the average sentence length,average word length,text difficulty,tokens,frequency and density of content words and top frequency words,and so on.The obtained results are compared and analyzed in the statistical tables,thereby providing strong reference and basis for the text analysis of Express Terms and Conditions.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,this study researches and illustrates the functional equivalence in terms of archaisms,concurrence and superposition,plural forms,passive voices,sentence complexity and modality between the source language and the target language.Different from traditional translation theories,functional equivalence theory pays attention to reader’s response that serves as one of standards of functional equivalence in translation,which gives a basis to the usage of translation techniques in the midst of translation.In addition to the emphasis of meaning priority in translation,functional equivalence theory concentrates on the style equivalence.Through the detailed exemplification and analysis of international Express Terms and Conditions from the perspective of functional equivalence theory,combining with statistical comparison in corpus,it demonstrates the achievement of functional equivalence between the source language and the target language of international Express Terms and Conditions.Ultimately,it discusses the translation methods used in Express Terms and Conditions from the angle of equivalence and naturalness.Hopefully,this work can be beneficial for practice.