A Report On C-E Translation Of The Spirit Of Chinese History(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Due to the limitations of Western historians’ national history,their historical vision must be limited.It is obviously inappropriate to interpret the special case of Chinese history from their point of view.In order to change the stereotype of the west,it is urgent to translate Chinese traditional political and historical texts.The Spirit of Chinese History was compiled from Mr.Qian Mu’s lectures in Taiwan.In this book,Mr.Qian systematically combs the context of China’s 5000-year development from different angles of politics,economy,national defense and moral spirit,starting with the historical spirit and historical methods,and using the method of comparison between China and the west,so as to explain the long history of Chinese history and culture and the key to the continuation and survival of Chinese culture for thousands of years.Although the text is not long,its content is broad and profound and it can be regarded as a good work to spread Chinese culture,especially the political level of the second chapter,which is rich in historical and political significance.Therefore,the translator chooses the second chapter of The Spirit of Chinese History as the translation material.Guided by Eugene Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory,this Chinese-English practice report summarizes the difficulties encountered in Chinese-English translation practice by analyzing typical cases from the three levels of lexical,syntactic and discourse respectively,and discusses the translation techniques used in combination with case.As the original text is highly political and literary in nature,in order to accurately convey the information of the original text in the translation,the translator adopts transliteration,annotation and paraphrase at the lexical level to achieve equivalence in lexical meaning;at the syntactic level,translation techniques such as conversion of part of speech,amplification and omission are used to achieve the equivalence of sentence structure and voice;at the discourse level,translation techniques such as conjunction,repetition and restructuring are adopted to achieve contextual coherence and cohesion.Under the guidance of Functional Equivalence Theory,the translator analyzes and summarizes the translation techniques applicable for the translation of Chinese traditional political texts in this translation practice,hoping to provide some references for the translation of the same type of texts.