A Report On The Translation Of Ecocritical Perspectives On Children’s Texts And Cultures:Nordic Dialogues(excerpts)

This report is a case study on the E-to-C translation of the book Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures: Nordic Dialogues(2018)which is an academic text,mainly discussing the ecocriticism of children’s literature.As an academic text,there are inevitably tremendous terminologies related to philosophy,natural aesthetics and ecocriticism in the book.Then,a large amount of long and difficult sentences have been used in the book which makes the whole translation process full of difficulty.To solve the translating problems and improve the translating quality,the translator has applied Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory during the process.The paper aims to demonstrate how functional equivalence effectively guides the translation of academic text.Functional equivalence proposes that a translation should seek for equivalent effect or response which means the ‘relationship between target receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message’.Functional equivalence also pursues the closest naturalness in expression.To achieve functional equivalence as much as possible,various translating methods and skills are required,such as literal translation,the shift of part of speech,the change of voice,the change of order,subtraction,admission and so on.The tremendous use of translating cases from the E-to-C translating version strongly clarifies that Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory significantly guides the translation of academic text through many aspects,such as lexical equivalence,syntactic equivalence and stylistic equivalence with different translating skills,strategies and methods accordingly.To some extent,applying functional equivalence theory to academic text,the target readers can get similar response as the original readers when reading the translating version and the original version.