A Study On E-C Translation Of Healing The Dependency On Depression From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

The present author has always been convinced by Nida's functional equivalence as a fundamental criterion of translation.In translating Healing the Dependency on Depression,a personal narrative account of ways and means to confront depression,she attempts to verify Nida's theory,and to evaluate its applicableness as a reliable criterion.She carries her experiment at lexical level and syntactic level as well,applying techniques like amplification,omission,substitution,splitting,reversing,etc.Functional equivalence,among various criteria stressing on equivalence as the sole criterion of translation,precisely realizes the universally accepted nature and aim of translation: translation means translating meaning.The transformation from one language to another is not arbitrary or unrestricted,nor a simple correspondence between words and structures.A good translation,Nida believes,requires translators to figure out a closest and natural equivalence of the source language.Meanwhile,target readers' response should be as approximate to readers' of the SL text as possible.Incorporating readers' response into translation criteria means a focus shift from linguistics to communicative function,which opens up a completely different approach to translation.However,the conception of functional equivalence still leaves much to be desired.For example,its overemphasis on the readability and communication results in style disparity between SL and TL,and a lack of cultural connotation.