Functional Equivalence In Exposition Essays’ Translation

This thesis analyzes the translation strategies used in the translation of The Idea Brokers—Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite from the perspective of Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory.The core of Functional Equivalence Theory is that the translator should translate the original text with the closest and most equivalent receptor language and the goal of translating is to let readers of translated text understand the text just like the way the original readers do.The original text belongs to an exposition essay.It has many prolonged sentences and its style is comparatively formal.This thesis is divided into three parts.In the first part,the author introduces Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory and shows the applicability of this theory to exposition essays.In the second part,the author analyzes the translation strategies from two perspectives based on the Functional Equivalence Theory:the vocabulary perspective and the sentence structural perspective.Since exposition essays are abundant with abstract words which are rich in denotations,we should adopt appropriate strategies to clearly define the lexical meaning.The analysis of vocabularies includes shift in parts of speech and the use of liberal translation.As for the sentence structural perspective,since the English grammar system is richer and more complex,the translator needs to divide the long sentence structures into short and simple ones,and change the passive voice into an active one.The translator can use the skills including splitting,shifting voice and recasting translation to achieve functional equivalence.In the last part,the author gives a conclusion which contains the difficulties of the translation practice and the translation methods of exposition essays.