At present, functional equivalence theory is widely used in literary and non-literary translation studies. In the field of non-literary translation, it is mainly used for the translation of economic, trade, law, science and technology, politics and education texts.

2. In the translation of educational texts, the application of functional equivalence theory mainly focuses on the translation of teaching materials and academic documents, but it has not been used to guide the translation of student manuals, so this topic is relatively novel. For example, Zhang Jingming (20 18) studied the translation of English textbooks for computer science from the perspective of functional equivalence theory; Wu (20 18) studies the translation of academic papers.

In addition, the functional equivalence theory emphasizes that "translation is to reproduce the information from semantics to style of the source language in the most appropriate, natural and equivalent language". (Guo Jianzhong, 2000) The student handbook is an information text, which emphasizes the transmission of information. Therefore, according to the types of source texts, it is feasible to use functional equivalence theory to guide the Chinese translation of student manuals.

Functional equivalence theory was put forward by American linguist Eugene A. Nida in 1969. Nida is a famous structuralist linguist, and he is also an important linguist. He is the president of the American Language Society.