A Translation Report On What Do You Think You Are? (Excerpts) Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Functional Equivalence Theory lays emphasis on a meaning-to-meaning equivalence and the response of readers,which means that what the receptors get should keep substantially the same as what the original receptors acquire.The English-Chinese translation report,under the guidance of Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory,explores the specific translation techniques during the translation process of excerpts from the book What do You Think You are?.The book,with its idiomatic,natural and humorous linguistic style,introduces some of the natural and social science theories and knowledge related with humans,and explains the composition of the human body,the origin of life and the meaning of life.This book aims to guide readers to gain a profound knowledge of human being and the biological and social meanings of this species.This report,based on an analysis of text type of the source text,summarizes the difficulties encountered in English-Chinese translation from the perspectives of lexis,sentences,texts and style of writing.And the author of this report makes case analysis and discusses the translation techniques used in the translation process at lexical level,syntactic level,textual level and stylistic level.At lexical level,the author mainly discusses diction,conversion and amplification.At syntactic level,in order to solve problems of voice,negative expressions and long sentences,the author adopts some techniques including converting passive voice into active one,converting negative expressions into affirmative ones,splitting,transposition and dividing.At textual level,cohesion and coherence is discussed to ensure a clear,logical and natural translation in accordance with idiomatic Chinese.At stylistic level,the author discusses methods applied in the translation of texts with rhetoric devices to achieve functional equivalence.This report demonstrates that Functional Equivalence Theory is of great guiding significance to the application of related translation techniques in the translation of informative texts.In this report,the author focuses on the stylistic value of texts and discusses creatively the translation of texts with literary elements in informative texts.