Translation Practice Report On The Memorandum Of Understanding From The Perspective Of The Functional Equivalence Theory

The foreign aid and lending to China by the World Bank,the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank contribute to the trade expansion and the economic boom.As the demand for the translation of loan agreement has increased,translators have been encouraged to overcome language and culture differences and further improve the qualityThis report is based on the memorandum of understanding translation.During the translator’s employment with the foreign affairs department of the local authority,the translator undertook the translation project of the memorandum of understanding on international loan.As one of practical writings of business English,the MOU covers the technical knowledge in different domains such as water management and finance assessment and specifies responsibilities and rights,giving a high priority to the information transmission.Depending on the text type,the translator chose the theory of functional equivalence as the guidance.Two critical parts of functional equivalence theory are centering reader’s response as the core and the emphasis on content over form.Therefore,to find out the closest natural equivalent of the source language message,translators should not only keep the translation be faithful to the English original but also value readers’ responses in the process of translation.In this report,the translator illustrates the translation process,summarizes the stylistic characteristics of the source text,presents several appropriate translation methods and techniques,and gives the conclusion which points to contributions and limitations.To be specific,the problems encountered by the translator in translation are studied from three levels:the lexical level,the syntactic level,and the textual level.In the light of Nida’s functional equivalence theory,the translator adopts translation methods and techniques,such as addition,shift and conversion,contributing to effective and faithful information transmission.The coherent and intelligible translation work allows the MOU to play its proper role in building the partnership,as a useful example for other translators facing similar texts.It is expected that this report could lend translators some added insights into the English-Chinese translation of agreements.