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According to Nida, a pioneer in the field of translation theory, functional equivalence is “the closest natural equivalent to the source language” (2001:91). He pointed out that previous translating aimed to reproduce the form. And the focus should be changed to a more natural equivalent which is reader-oriented. Taking the cultural factors into consideration while translating, Nida asserted that a favorable and satisfactory translation is a text that readers no longer need to comprehend the cultural background of the source language while reading.
The research conducted in this paper is a study on the translation of culture-loaded words in Chinese classics from the perspective of Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory. Different translation approaches of culture-loaded words are compared and four translating strategies are analyzed in this paper.
2 Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory
This chapter will give a brief introduction of Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory. The first part focuses on Nida’s core concepts of translating. The second part is the analyses of the development of functional equivalence theory both at home and abroad.
2.1 Nida’s Concept of Translating
Eugene A. Nida is a great translation theorist as well as linguist in the world and he is supposed to be one of the most influential translation theorist.
According to Nida, translating in the past paid too much attention to the form of the message, and translators tried hard to reproduce stylistic specialties, such as rhythms, parallelism, grammatical structures, etc. And the new focus of translating “has shifted from the form of the message to the response of the receptor. Therefore, what one must determine is the response of the receptor to the translated message. This response must then be compared with the way in which the original receptors presumably reacted to the message when it was given in its original setting” (Nida & Taber, 2004: 1).