Functional Equivalence And Business English Translation

It's known to all that with the globalization of economy, international business is now very common and business English is being more and more important. A great many people are doing research work on business English and business English translation. For example, the book Teaching Business English co-authored by Mark Ellis and Johnson Christine studies the language features of business English and the ways to teach it. And domestic scholars like Liu Fagong have been doing researches on the translations of business English.In this paper, we have combined the discussion of the language features of business English with the study of business English translation. We have done the two by applying Nida's theory of functional equivalence. By functional equivalence, Nida refers to the equivalence "first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style". Nida also holds that the degree to which the receptors of the message in the receptor language respond to the TLT should be the same as the degree to which the receptors in the source language respond to the SLT. We think the two points above are in effect the same because when the TLT and the SLT are functionally equivalent in meaning and style, the degree to which the receptors of the message in the receptor language respond to the TLT is surely the same or almost the same as the degree to which the receptors in the source language respond to the SLT.In order to prove that this theory can be best applied to business English translation, we first summarized the language features of business English from two perspectives, namely, the perspective of function and the perspective of style. In view of function, we think business English mainly has two functions, the informative function and the interpersonal function. In view of style, we think business English language has thefollowing features: "clearness, conciseness, correctness, consistency, courtesy, formality and completeness".On the basis of the above discussion, we have translated plenty of examples of business English, achieving functional equivalence in both meaning and style at the word level, the sentence level and the discourse level. This result indicates that Nida's theory of functional equivalence can be best applied in business English translation and functional equivalence can be achieved in both meaning and style.