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Generally speaking, few people apply Nida’s functional equivalence theory, also known as Dynamic Equivalence, to the Chinese-English translation of GWR. Specialist books have not been published to introduce GWR in the western countries, because GWR is a political document with distinct Chinese characteristics. In China, only those prominent and senior translators, for instance Lumin, Wang Nongsheng and Jia Yuling, researched that thoroughly and comprehensively. Besides, fewer materials expound the lexical items with Chinese characteristics of GWR in a specific way.
Based on functional equivalence theory, this paper analyzes the translation of lexical items with Chinese characteristics in 2015 GWR with the qualitative analysis and language database method. Therefore, the paper plans to do two things as follows: to prove the importance of the lexical items with Chinese characteristics for the GWR translation; to put forward right translating principles in translating GWR in future.
II. Functional Equivalence Theory
Eugene A. Nida was a linguist who developed the dynamic equivalence Bible translation theory and one of the founders of the modern discipline of Translation Studies. In his academic career, he engaged in different kinds of study, including semantics, linguistics, anthropology and communication engineering, and also participated in the translation works, among which The Theory and Practice of Translation, Toward a Science of Translating, Language Structure and Translation, and The Sociolinguistics of Inter-lingual Translation are his magnum opuses and the most famous and influential writings in the field of translation.
Nida has made such a great achievement in the realm of translation theory. His most notable contribution to translation theory is Dynamic Equivalence, also known as Functional Equivalence, putted forward in 1969. Different from the traditional translation theories that mainly emphasize the correspondence between the source language and target language, it stresses that target readers’ reactions to the translated text should be similar to native readers’ reactions to the source text and it takes this as the criterion of evaluating the translation (“From One Language to Another Language” 25). In addition, he advocates: content first and form second (Nida “Toward A Science of Translating” 14). Yet, the advocacy does not stress the content but neglects the importance of form. It should be content equivalence and at the same time form equivalence, and content equivalence should be taken into consideration first if it is impossible to reach the two types of equivalence at the same time.
Translation relates to message passing between different cultures. The meaning of words translated, however, cannot be absolutely the same as that of target language because of various historical backgrounds (Nida “Language and Culture” 52). Nida holds that translation is not only the equivalence of words’ meaning but also the equivalence of style, semantics and the message translation of both the surface lexical information and profound cultural information, and that functional equivalence has four levels: lexical level, syntactic level, textual level and stylistic level (Nida and Taber 118). Lexical level is the basic of the four various types of equivalence. The meaning of a word depends on its usage in language. On occasion the Chinese meaning does not correspond to English lexical items at all. Nevertheless, in other time the same Chinese word has many equal English lexical items. All in all, in different context, the same English or Chinese word has various connotative meaning, which influences the choice of words.
III. Lexical Items with Chinese Characteristics in Government Work Report
Lexical items with Chinese characteristics refer to unique language expressions in Chinese, which only fit into Chinese national condition, society and history. It includes some concept, political terms and items with distinctive national characteristics. In this chapter, firstly, the writer will introduce contents and characteristics of Government Work Report, and then lexical items with Chinese characteristics in 2015 GWR will be explained in great details. In addition, problems occurred in the process of translating lexical items with Chinese characteristics and principles in translating lexical items with Chinese characteristics are briefly presented.