The English-chinese Translation Of COVID-19-related News Articles In The Economist From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

The world is being challenged by the novel coronavirus(COVID-19).In just a few months,the deadly virus has been reaching every corner of the earth,bringing with it a manifold of unprecedented medical and social problems.Doctors,scientists,and political leaders all over the world have been working around the clock,trying their best to minimize the damage the virus caused.A key for them to succeed is to promptly assimilate the latest findings and the best ideas from their foreign colleagues.This,in turn,depends on how effective information can be delivered over language barriers.This report is based on the author’s attempt to translate several news articles on the coronavirus disease.The source articles were selected from The Economist,which has been leading the discussion on the subject.This dissertation is organized as follows.The first chapter provides an overview of the project,and discusses the significance of translation on this particular topic.The second chapter contains a summary of the preparatory work,which focuses on listing the major technical issues encountered in the early stage of translation.It also includes a review of the principle of Functional Equivalence,a theory first proposed by the renowned American linguist Eugene A.Nida,as well as its relevance here.In the next chapter,it is shown that the application of the theory helps resolve many of the above-mentioned difficulties.For example,the author would sometimes choose to spell out the meaning of difficult noun phrases when a word-for-word translation was no longer adequate.For words of multiple meanings,the author would pick the best to fit the context.To make translation more appealing to Chinese readers,the author frequently resorted to four-character phrases commonly found in Chineseidioms.The author would often break down long sentences,put words in a different order,or switch between active and passive voices,as long as doing so made the translation more readable.The final chapter is a review of the project and the lessons that have been learned.The hope is that the public can be better informed of the progress of the coronavirus disease,and this work is a step forward in this direction.