Equivalence and equivalent effect

英语论文 关于功能对等理论的论文

Nida’s Functional Equivalence and Its

Application

Abstract: With the development of market economy in our country, more and more enterprises either state-owned enterprises or private-owned enterprises are facing the competition from all over the world. Enterprises have the need to go global. This paper holds the view that functional equivalence is applicable in the translation of trademarks and advertisings, due to the reason that both of which are practical text styles, with the purpose of arousing customers’ interests and persuading them to take action. Therefore, the translation of trademarks and advertisings should be equivalent to the original text and functional in similar ways as the original one does. Therefore, functional equivalence should be viewed as the right theory of trademarks and advertisings translation. Firstly, this paper gives a brief introduction to the theory of Nida’s functional equivalence. Secondly, this paper elaborates functional equivalence in trademarks and advertising translation.

The introduction of Nida’s functional equivalence

Nida's theory has contributed outstandingly to translation field,

especially, his "functional equivalence" theory is the breakthrough

in translation and has provided us with profound enlightenment in

establishing new translation theoretical mode.

Nida (1964) suggests formal and dynamic or functional equivalence. Formal equivalence focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content. It requires that the message in the target language should match as closely as possible the different elements in the source language (p.159). Dynamic equivalence is based on the principle of equivalent effect, where the relationship between the receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message (p. 159). Newmark (1981) makes a distinction between communicative and semantic translation. Like Nida's dynamic equivalence, communicative translation also tries to create the effect on the target text reader which is the same as that received by readers of the source language text. Koller (1997) proposes denotative, connotative, pragmatic, textual, formal and aesthetic equivalence.

The comparison of texts in different languages inevitably involves a theory of equivalence. Equivalence can be said to be the central issue in translation.

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