A Report On E-C Translation Of The Power Of Strangers:The Benefits Of Connecting In A Suspicious World (Part One) Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Under the background of continuous development of economy and society,people are faced with social pressure.And most people will have psychological pressure when connecting with strangers.The first part of The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting a Suspicious World is selected as the source text.The book is written by Joe Keohane,an American journalist.He uses his own experience to show that connecting with strangers can bring us much benefits.This translation practice can enhance people’s confidence in social contact and help people cope with social difficulties or anxiety.This is a social psychology book and the whole text is mainly narrated.Nida’s functional equivalence theory emphasizes the natural and accurate transformation of the original text information according to the expression habits of the target text readers.Therefore,functional equivalence theory can effectively solve the difficulties caused by cultural and linguistic structure differences between English and Chinese.Based on functional equivalence theory,the report discusses the translation skills and techniques of the target text at lexical,syntactic,textual and stylistic level through case analysis.At lexical level,the translator adopts addition,omission and shift of part-of-speech to enhance the readability of the target text.At syntactic level,inversion and division are used to translate long and compound sentences in the original text,so that the target text conforms to Chinese sentence structure.At textual level,the referring expressions and conjunctions are adjusted to make the translated text concise and coherent.In terms of stylistic level,free translation is adopted to simplify the rhetorical devices and expressions that are difficult to correspond to Chinese by directly expressing their connotation.And repetition is adopted to make the translation more in line with Chinese language features.These above translation techniques enable the target text to achieve functional equivalence,that is to accurately convey the information of the source text and attach importance to readers’ response.In this report,the translator summarizes the skills and experience of functional equivalence theory in guiding social science text translation,hoping to provide references and guidance for other relevant translation practices,and also hopes that this translation practice can help readers improve their social skills.