A Report On The Translation Of When China Rules The World(Chapter 4) In The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This paper is a translation practice project report selected from the fourth chapter of When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques,a British economist.In this chapter,the author introduces the changes in China's political and economic conditions since the Qin dynasty,and describes the turbulent Chinese history and earth-shaking changes.In When China Rules the World,Martin Jacques,a top scholar who is familiar with east and west,analyzes the fundamental differences and similarities between China's development model and that of the west.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,the purpose of this report is to carry out the translation practice of When China Rules the World,and on this basis,to summarize the key points and difficulties of translation in this text.When China rules the world is a non-literary political and economic text.On the basis of understanding the author's writing background information and reading a large number of historical materials,the translator,under the guidance of the functional equivalence theory of American translator Eugene Nida,translated the fourth chapter of this paper,and discussed how to be faithful to the original text.Nida(2004)believed that the equivalence in function and the same effect for the target readers should be pursued.In the case study of this report,the translator starts from the lexical level,and illustrates how to deal with the lexical difficulties in the process of translation from the aspects of proper nouns and part of speech conversion with examples.The translator uses reference books and network resources to look up proper nouns and translate them.Then,according to the characteristics of Chinese and English,and under the guidance of the functional equivalence theory,part-of-speech conversion is carried out during translation.The translator converts some English nouns into verbs,adjectives into adverbs,and adverbs into verbs.Then,the translator analyzes the syntactic aspects of the book,giving examples from passive sentences,long sentences and quoted sentences,and compares them with existing versions to explore how to apply appropriate translation strategies to represent the information of the original sentence.Finally,thetranslator analyzes the coherence and style of the text and adopts appropriate translation method to achieve functional equivalence.This report argues that in order to reproduce the semantics and style of such texts,the author's background information and writing intention should first be understood,then the text content should be repeatedly read,the lexical,syntactic and stylistic features of the text should be extracted,and finally appropriate translation strategies should be used for translation.In the process of this translation project,the translator had a further understanding of Eugene Nida's functional equivalence theory,understood its significance for English-Chinese translation practice,mastered several practical skills,and accumulated experience in English-Chinese translation.At the same time,this translation practice also help the translator realize the importance of knowledge reserve,which also gives the translator inspiration: firstly,the translator should improve his own shortcomings in translation and learn translation skills in practice;secondly,he should broaden the study of professional knowledge and widely involve in different professional knowledge;finally,he should learn English and Chinese well while respecting cultural differences,and lay a good foundation for higher quality translation.