A Study Of C-E Translation Of China’s National Defense White Papers From The Perspective Of Functional Equivaience Theory

Nowadays exchanges between countries have increased dramatically. As a necessary communication tool, languages assume the major responsibility in international communication. Political documents, which is one form of written language, play a key role in the diplomacy between different countries, and the publication of national defense white papers of countries in the world enhance military communication between different countries as well as military transparency. Therefore, the translation of NDWPs has become the focus of research for translation scholars both at home and abroad.As to the studies on the translation of national defense white papers, some scholars and students majoring in translation and interpretation have their own research directions. Therefore, a further study on the C-E translation of national defense white papers will have profound and lasting influence. Nida’s functional equivalence theory is one of the most important translation theories among his translation studies.The thesis aims at discussing the C-E translation of China’s national defense white papers under the guidance of functional equivalence theory. All of the previous studies about the C-E translation of white papers focus on phonetics, semantics, syntactic, stylistics and rhetoric. The author tries to study the C-E translation of national defense white papers on three levels:lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level. All the data used in this thesis come from the official website of the State Council Information Office, and the contents cover the latest three years’information of China’s national defense.Most of previous researches about the application of functional equivalence to the translation were centered on news translation, subtitle translation and business letter translation, and conducted hardly any relevant studies on white paper translation, not to mention C-E translation on national defense white papers. In the previous studies on the translation of national defense white papers, skopos theory and other relevant theories are frequently used as the theoretical guidance of the research, while in this thesis, the author creatively combines the functional equivalence theory and the C-E translation of China’s national defense white papers.Through detailed analysis, the author of the thesis finds that there are some differences in the expression of Chinese and English political documents:1. On the lexical level, Chinese is verb-centered, and there are many proverbs, words with Chinese characteristics and additional glossary. The repetition is avoided in Chinese expression. While English is noun-centered, and there must be some indeterminacy in the translation of Chinese proverbs, words with Chinese political features.2. On the syntactic level, Chinese is topic-centered, while English is subject-centered. That is to say, the subject is essential in an English sentence but it is common for a Chinese sentence without a subject.3. On the discourse level, the difference between Chinese and English lies in the linkage of sentences. English emphasizes the logical order of sentences and uses more cohesive devices, and the topic sentence is usually at the beginning of the paragraph and the conclusion sentence at the last. While in Chinese, the topic sentence is usually put in the middle or at the end of a paragraph.After the above analysis, the author summarizes some principles and methods during the C-E translation of national defense white papers. Translation methods like word for word translation, formal equivalence translation, substitution of synonyms, and omission are frequently used in words translation. Adding or changing the subject, change of adjective and adverbial modifiers are often used in the sentence translation. On the discourse level, division, combination and cohesion are all appropriate methods.Since it is the first attempt of applying functional equivalence to the C-E translation of China’s national defense white papers, there are some limitations. First, the functional theory itself has its shortage. The aim of functional equivalence is to achieve equivalence both on form and contents, but because of the differences between different languages, it is really hard to achieve a functional equivalence both on form and contents. Second, because of the limitations of the length of the thesis, examples studied in the thesis are relatively few and some of them are not very obvious. Third, national defense white papers belong to political documents and the language style is formal and serious, and all the examples selected from them express the same thing, thus the diversity of examples can not be achieved.As for future studies, the author also makes a list of suggestions:first, since white papers of different contents are inextricably linked with each other, a translator must spend time reading some other types of white papers before the translation. Only in this way can he provide a natural and accurate translation to readers of the target language. Second, the contents of national defense white papers will involve some special and rare fields, which requires a translator to equip himself with not only military knowledge but also knowledge of some other fields.