翻译对等

外文资料原文Translation EquivalenceDespite the fact that the world is becoming a global village, translation remains a major way for languages and cultures to interact and influence each other. And name translation, especially government name translation, occupies a quite significant place in international exchange.It is generally accepted that translation, not as a separate entity, blooms into flower under such circumstances like culture, societal functions, politics and power relations. Nowadays, the filed of translation studies is immersed with abundantly diversified translation standards, with no exception that some of them are presented by renowned figures and are rather authoritative. In the translation practice, however, how should we select the so-called translation standards to serve as our guidelines in the translation process and how should we adopt the translation standards to evaluate a translation product?In the macro-context of flourish of linguistic theories, theorists in the translation circle, keep to the golden law of the principle of equivalence. The theory of Translation Equivalence is the central issue in western translation theories. And the presentation of this theory gives great impetus to the development and improvement of translation theory. It's not difficult for us to discover that it is the theory of Translation Equivalence that serves as guidelines in government name translation in China. Name translation, as defined, is the replacement of the name in the source language by an equivalent name or other words in the target language. Translating Chinese government names into English, similarly, is replacing the Chinese government name with an equivalent in English.Metaphorically speaking, translation is often described as a moving trajectory going from A to B along a path or a container to carry something across from A to B. This view is commonly held by both translation practitioners and theorists in the West. In this view, they do not expect that this trajectory or something will change itsidentity as it moves or as it is carried. In China, to translate is also understood by many people normally as "to translate the whole text sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, without any omission, addition, or other changes". In both views, the source text and the target text must be "the same". This helps explain the etymological source for the term "translation equivalence". It is in essence a word which describes the relationship between the ST and the TT.Equivalence means the state or fact or property of being equivalent. It is widely used in several scientific fields such as chemistry and mathematics. Therefore, it comes to have a strong scientific meaning that is rather absolute and concise. Influenced by this, translation equivalence also comes to have an absolute denotation though it was first applied in translation study as a general word. From a linguistic point of view, it can be divided into three sub-types, i.e., formal equivalence, semantic equivalence, and pragmatic equivalence. In actual translation, it frequently happens that they can not be obtained at the same time, thus forming a kind of relative translation equivalence in terms of quality. In terms of quantity, sometimes the ST and TT are not equivalent, too. Absolute translation equivalence both in quality and quantity, even though obtainable, is limited to a few cases.The following is a brief discussion of translation equivalence study conducted by three influential western scholars, Eugene Nida, Andrew Chesterman and Peter Newmark. It's expected that their studies can instruct GNT study in China and provide translators with insightful methods.Eugene NidaEugene A. Nida's definition of translation is:"Translation consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message , first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style." It's a replacement of textual material in one language〔SL〕by equivalent textual material in another language〔TL〕. The translator must strive for equivalence rather than identity. In a sense, this is just another way of emphasizing the reproducing of the message rather than the conservation of the form of the utterance.The message in the receptorlanguage should match as closely as possible the different elements in the source language to reproduce as literally and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original. Translation equivalence is an empirical phenomenon discovered by comparing SL and TL texts and it's a useful operational concept like the term "unit of translation".Nida argues that there are two different types of equivalence, namely formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Formal correspondence focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content, whereas dynamic equivalence is based upon "the principle of equivalent effect".Formal correspondence consists of a TL item which represents the closest equivalent of a ST word or phrase. Nida and Taber make it clear that there are not always formal equivalents between language pairs. Therefore, formal equivalents should be used wherever possible if the translation aims at achieving formal rather than dynamic equivalence. The use of formal equivalents might at times have serious implications in the TT since the translation will not be easily understood by the target readership. According to Nida and Taber, formal correspondence distorts the grammatical and stylistic patterns of the receptor language, and hence distorts the message, so as to cause the receptor to misunderstand or to labor unduly hard.Dynamic equivalence is based on what Nida calls "the principle of equivalent effect" where the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message. The message has to be modified to the receptor's linguistic needs and cultural expectation and aims at complete naturalness of expression. Naturalness is a key requirement for Nida. He defines the goal of dynamic equivalence as seeking the closest natural equivalent to the SL message. This receptor-oriented approach considers adaptations of grammar, of lexicon and of cultural references to be essential in order to achieve naturalness; the TL should not show interference from the SL, and the 'foreignness' of the ST setting is minimized.Nida is in favour of the application of dynamic equivalence, as a more effective translation procedure. Thus, the product of the translation process, that is the text inthe TL, must have the same impact on the different readers it was addressing. Only in Nida and Taber's edition is it clearly stated that dynamic equivalence in translation is far more than mere correct communication of information.Andrew ChestermanAs Andrew Chesterman points out in his recent book Memes of Translation, equivalence is one of the five supermemes of translation theory, standing shoulder to shoulder with source-target, untranslatability, free-vs-literal, All-writing-is-translating in importance. Pragmatically speaking, observed Chesterman, "the only true examples of equivalence (i.e., absolute equivalence) are those in which an ST item X is invariably translated into a given TL as Y, and vice versa. Typical examples would be words denoting numbers (with the exception of contexts in which they have culture-bound connotations, such as "magic" or "unlucky"), certain technical terms (oxygen, molecule) and the like. From this point of view, the only true test of equivalence would be invariable back-translation. This, of course, is unlikely to occur except in the case of a small set of lexical items, or perhaps simple isolated syntactic structure.Peter NewmarkDeparting from Nida's receptor-oriented line, Newmark argues that the success of equivalent effect is"illusory"and that the conflict of loyalties and the gap between emphasis on source and target language will always remain as the overriding problem in translation theory and practice. He suggests narrowing the gap by replacing the old terms with those of semantic and communicative translation. The former attempts to render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original, while the latter "attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original". Newmark's description of communicative translation resembles Nida's dynamic equivalence in the effect it is trying to create on the TT reader, while semantic translation has similarities to Nida's formal equivalence.Meanwhile, Newmark points out that only by combining both semantic and communicative translation, can we achieve the goal of keeping the 'spirit' of the original. Semantic translation requires the translator retain the aesthetic value of the original, trying his best to keep the linguistic feature and characteristic style of the author. According to semantic translation, the translator should always retain the semantic and syntactic structures of the original. Deletion and abridgement lead to distortion of the author's intention and his writing style.。