1.5 Eugene A.Nida’s Suggestion on Free Translation

　　Eugene A.Nida is a distinguished American translation theorist as well as a linguist. His translation theory has exerted a tremendous influence on the western translation circle and he is regarded as the most influential one among all contemporary translation theorists. Nida’s influence upon Chinese translation studies is greater than that upon western translation studies. Before his theory was introduced into China in the 1980s, people mainly focused on traditional Chinese translation theories, especially Yan Fu’s three-character principle of translation, i.e. faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance. In the book Language, Culture and Translation, Nida further divides “functional equivalence” into categories on two levels: the minimal level and the maximal level. The minimal level of “functional equivalence” is defined as “The readers of a translated text should be able to comprehend it to the point that they can conceive of how original readers of the text must have understood and appreciated it”. The maximal level is stated as “The readers of a translated text should be able to understand and appreciate it in essentially the same manner as original readers did” (Nida, 1993). The minimal level is realistic, which suggests that Nida was in favor of free translation, but anything less than this degree of equivalence should be unacceptable. The maximal level is ideal and can rarely, if ever, be achieved. Therefore, according to Nida, good translations always lie somewhere between the two levels (Nida, 1995). That is, in general it is best to speak of “functional equivalence” in terms of a range of adequacy, since no translation is ever completely equivalent .A number of different translations can in fact represent varying degrees of equivalence. This means that “equivalence” cannot be understood in its mathematical meaning of identity, but only in terms of proximity, i.e. on the basis of closeness to

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