Functional equivalence theory was put forward by American linguist Eugene Nida. Nida studied under several famous structuralist linguists and was an important linguist himself. He is the president of the American Language Society. However, this well-known academic figure stayed away from the academic center and quietly worked for the American Bible Society for more than half a century.

His main academic activities in his life centered on Bible translation. In the process of translating the Bible, Nida developed his own translation theory from reality and eventually became one of the classics of translation studies. The core concept of Nida's theory is "functional equivalence".

The so-called "functional equivalence" means that translation does not seek rigid correspondence on the surface of words, but realizes functional equivalence between the two languages.

Principle:

1. Strive to create a translation that not only conforms to the semantics of the original text but also reflects the cultural characteristics of the original text. However, the two languages represent two completely different cultures, and the cultures may have similar factors, but they cannot be exactly the same. Therefore, it is impossible to have a perfect translation that fully shows the cultural connotation of the original text, and the translator can only reproduce the source culture to the maximum extent.

2. If meaning and culture cannot be taken into account at the same time, the translator can only give up formal equivalence and achieve the purpose of reproducing the semantics and culture of the original text by changing the form of the original text in translation. For example, the English proverb "as white as snow" can be literally translated into Chinese "as white as snow".

There is almost no snow in the south of China all year round, and there is no concept of "snow" in their cultural background knowledge. How to understand the connotation of snow? In translation, the translator can eliminate cultural differences by changing the form of words. So this proverb can be translated into "white as mushrooms" and "white as egret hair" in Chinese.

3. If the change of form is still not enough to express the semantics and culture of the original text, we can use the translation skills of "heavy loss" to solve the cultural differences and make the source language and the target language equivalent in meaning. "Heavy loss" refers to transforming the deep structure of the source language into the surface structure of the target language, that is, explaining and explaining the cultural connotation of the source language article through the vocabulary of the target language.

For example, "he thinks through infection and catches an idea like a cold." "He thinks what others think, just like he has a cold." In the original English text of this sentence, the connotation of the original text is not expressed by the superficial meaning of the word, but hidden between the lines.

Extended data:

Eugene A. Nida put forward the famous translation theory of "dynamic equivalence", namely "functional equivalence", from the perspective of linguistics and according to the essence of translation. In this theory, he pointed out that "translation is to reproduce the information from semantics to style of the source language in the most appropriate, natural and equivalent language".

Nida's definition of translation shows that translation is not only equivalent in lexical meaning, but also equivalent in semantics, style and style. The information conveyed by translation includes both superficial lexical information and deep cultural information. Equivalence in "dynamic equivalence" includes four aspects: lexical equivalence, syntactic equivalence, textual equivalence and stylistic equivalence.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Functional Equivalence Theory