A Report On The Translation Of Ethnic Culture From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory ——Taking The Translation Of Modern Technology Dissemination And Cultural Changes Of Guizhou Ethnic Villages(excerpt)as An Example

Ethnic culture is one of the hot spots of social science research in China in recent years.Translation of ethnic cultural text contributes to promoting international cultural exchanges.The selected text of this translation practice is from modern technology transmission and cultural change in Guizhou ethnic villages,written by Mei Qijun and Zhang Li,published in September 2017.The book consists of six chapters.This translation practice mainly focuses on the first and second section of the fifth chapter,including “the dissemination of information technology and change in access to information” and “the spread of information technology and change of lifestyle”.The text covers about 12,000 words.The content of the text involves Dong culture,Miao culture and the cultural customs of other ethnic minorities in southwest China.The translation is based on Eugene Nida’s theory of functional equivalence.The work consists of three parts: preparation before translation,work during translation and review after translation.Case studies are used to show the strategies employed in translation.The translation practice has the following revelations.Firstly,semantic translation is an effective strategy for words whose context meaning is different from the literal meaning.Semantic translation should adopt words close to the target language expression habits.Secondly,cultural loaded words contain rich cultural information.Transliteration and literal translation,accompanied by annotation,can be used to transfer the cultural information of the source language completely.Thirdly,comparatively speaking,Chinese uses verbs more frequently,while English uses nouns,prepositions and adjectives more frequently.Where appropriate,it is advisable to consider translating verbs into other parts of speech in order to cater for English expression habits.Fourthly,the features of Chinese and English sentences are different.In order to make the target language as natural as the source language,the strategies of reorganization,omission,addition can be used in sentence translation.These strategies need to be selected flexibly in specific contexts.Fifthly,both Chinese and English paragraphs need coherence,but the means to achieve coherence are different.When translating paragraphs,we need to adopt appropriate cohesive devices in specific contexts,so as to achieve the fluency close to the source language.The above strategies are of great significance to the achievement of functional equivalence.However,each strategy has its own advantages and disadvantages,and needs to be used appropriately in contexts.