Translation Of Political News Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

China,once a mysterious but closed eastern nation,has now emerged from a lagged-behind and impoverished country into one of the most influential powers on the international arena.What happens to this changing country everyday has increasingly caught the attention from the outside world.Meanwhile,as the largest developing country,China is also eager to get understood and connect to the rest of the world through a bridge,and political news can serve as such a bridge for other countries to get a comprehensive knowledge of a modern China.With the deepening of the reform and opening up in a modernized China,its comprehensive national power and international status have been greatly enhanced.China is increasingly attracting other countries all over the world.As a way of transmitting information on current events,news is widely presented everyday via mass media,such as the Internet,newspaper,radio,TV and so on.News translation,at the same time,serves as a carrier of message transmitted for the second time.Its value is more and more prominent during the exchange of policy,economy,culture and society between China and other nations.Different from other equivalence theories,Nida's theory focuses on the relationship between the translated text and the target language readers instead of between the original text and the translated one.He distinguishes "formal equivalence" and "functional equivalence",and regards the reader's response as the true criterion of translation.A successful translation should arouse the same response from the target language readers as that of the original text readers.According to Nida,functional equivalence refers to the equivalence "first in terms of meaning and second in terms of style".These two criteria of translation have the same effect because when the TL(target language)text and the SL(source language)text are functionally equivalent both in meaning and style,the responses they get from their readers is bound to be the same or almost the same.In order to prove the feasibility of functional equivalence theory to the translation of political news,this report firstly introduces previous studies of equivalence by different translation theorists as well as the current situation of political news translation at home and abroad to provide a general idea of the studies in this field.After that,Nida's functional equivalence theory is put forward as the theoretical guidance for the author's translation.Then the language features of political news are analyzed from word level and sentence level.Finally,translation strategies are proposed to achieve functional equivalence in both meaning and style at the levels of word,sentence,text and culture.Plenty of examples are employed to prove that Nida's functional equivalence theory is applicable for guiding the translation of political news.The author of this report hopes that the study can provide some insights into the translation of political news as well as practical translation strategies to help translators in the process of translating political news.