A Report On English-Chinese Translation Of Social Science Journal Articles Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Since the 18th CPC National Congress,the project of Ideological and Political Theories Teaching in All Courses has emerged as a research hotspot in the field of education in China under the impetus of national policies.Research on character,moral,and value education in Western societies have shared many intersections with this project.In order to provide a more comprehensive knowledge of character,moral and value education in Western societies,an increasing volume of articles on character education have been translated into China,playing an important role in the construction of Ideological and Political Theories Teaching in All Courses in China.This report was based on the reflection on the translation of two articles which were excerpted from the Handbook of Moral and Character Education,published by Routledge and edited by Larry P.Nucci and Darcia Narvaez in 2008.The author was a research assistant of the Research Center for Teaching Development and Teacher Development of Shandong University.These two articles,20000 words,belong to the genre of academic writing,representing a highly formal language style with objective content,rigorous and logical exposition.The academic texts frequently resorted to terminology,noun structures,and non-predicate verbs at lexical level,long and complicated sentences and passive sentences at syntactic level,and semantic coherence and structural cohesion at discourse level.At these three levels,the author encountered difficulties in understanding and converting the meaning of words,sentence structures,and logical relations of discourses,respectively.Based on translation theoretical knowledge,the author applied inductive,deductive and qualitative analysis methods,extracted typical cases,summarized general problems,selected appropriate theoretical guidance,and analyzed translation cases to solve problems in the translation process and drew relevant experience.The functional equivalence theory suggested that translation was a kind of communication,and that the translator should not only translate the content of the source texts accurately,but also take readers’ response into consideration with the closest "natural" language in the translation(Nida,1969).Based on the guidance of the theory,the author employed several translation methods,such as free translation,adaptation,and conversion,to solve translation difficulties for achieving the communicative function of academic texts.By case analysis,the process of English to Chinese translation practice of academic texts was analyzed from three levels,which were lexical,syntactic,and discourse level.At the lexical level,literal translation and conversion were mainly used to ensure the reciprocity of the content of the source text.At the syntactic level,conversion and adaptation helped reorganize the sentence structure to conform to Chinese habits.At the discourse level,conversions,additions and omissions make the readers of the translated text obtain a similar feeling to that of the readers of the source text.By this translation practice,the guiding role of the functional equivalence theory on academic texts was presented,the author’s awareness on the application of functional equivalence theory to translation practice and his ability in dealing with the translations of academic texts were improved.The author hoped that this translation practice would make contributions to academic exchanges,as well as provide some suggestions and examples for such translation practice.