A Report On Translating The Complete Guide To Fasting Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This report is based on the E-C translation practice of a popular medical science book,The Complete Guide to Fasting.In the course of translation,the translator encountered some difficulties in dealing with medical terminology,complex long sentences,impersonal sentences and explicit cohesive devices.To overcome them,the translator resorted to Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory.This theory,with its four principles of equivalence at lexical,syntactic,textual and stylistic levels,emphasizes more on meaning than on form.Therefore,instead of rigidly adhering to the source text,the translator only needs to "naturally" reproduce the original meaning into translation,which is also required by the press of the translated book.In that sense,the equivalence theory does have a strong guiding role in the translation of the popular medical science book,which corresponds to the indications of literature review before translation.In this report,the translator uses examples to illustrate how the translation difficulties are conquered under the Functional Equivalence Theory in a qualitative way.Besides,corpus tools assist in comparisons between the original text and the translated text for further explanations of equivalence in a quantitative way,including tagger software—POS-tagger by Stanford University for English text,NLPIR(or say ICTCLAS)by Chinese Academy of Sciences for Chinese text,as well as retrieval software—AntConc and WordSmith.Besides,this report provokes the translator's reflections on translation.Before translation,a thorough study shall be made to understand the linguistic features of the original text and excavate the translation difficulties.During translation,when the source text and the target text fail to achieve equivalence due to language differences,priority should be given to meaning.What's more,proofreading after translation is inevitable to effectively improve personal translation skills.