Equivalence and equivalent effect

2024年3月27日发(作者：上汽通用别克汽车)

邢佳春 2 笔译二班

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

邢佳春 2 笔译二班

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.

The theorists have studied equivalence in relation to the translation process,

using different approaches, and have provided fruitful ideas for further study on

this topic. In fact, when a message is transferred from the SL to TL, the translator is

also dealing with two different cultures at the same time. This particular aspect

seems to have been taken into consideration by t Nida who regard translation

equivalence as being essentially a transfer of the message from the SC to the TC

and a pragmatic/semantic or functionally oriented approach to translation.

Nida: Formal correspondence and dynamic equivalence

Nida argued that there are two different types of equivalence, namely

formal

equivalence

—which in the second edition by Nida and Taber (1982) is referred to