Translation Equivalence 翻译对等理论

Translation Equivalence

Despite 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 its identity 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 Nida

Eugene 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