摘要

随着中国加入世界贸易组织和经济全球化时代的到来，我国经济正在成为世界经济中重要的一部分。在这个进程当中，作为中国与世界其他国家商务交流纽带和桥梁的外贸函电及其翻译起着越来越重要的作用。国内外有许多学者在从事外贸函电的研究，他们对外贸函电翻译的研究重点主要在其语言特点上，明确地将函电翻译和一翻译理论相结合的相对较少。为了使系统的翻译理论和函电翻译结合起来，本文将以奈达功能对等翻译理论作为指导来探讨外贸函电的翻译策略。
奈达的功能对等理论强调译文与原文在意义与文体两个方面的动态对等，同时也强调译文读者对译文的反应与原文读者对原文的反应程度应大致相同。为了论述该理论适应于外贸函电翻译，本文首先从功能和文体两个方面分析了外贸函电的语言特点，得出在功能方面外贸函电主要具有信息功能和人际功能，在文体方面外贸函电语言特点体现为“清楚，简洁，准确，统一，礼貌，正式和完整”。
在此基础上，本文对外贸函电翻译实例进行了分析，分别从词、句、篇三个层面上探讨了意义与文体的对等。事实证明，在奈达功能对等理论的指导下，外贸函电的译文完全可以在意义与文体两个方面达到与原文功能对等。

关键词：外贸函电，功能对等，词汇，句式，文体

ABSTRACT

With China’s entry to the WTO and the approach of the globalization, the economy of our country is becoming an important part of the world economy. In this process, the business letter, which connects China and other countries in the business world, is playing a more and more significant role. A great many scholars at home and abroad are doing research work on business letter and business letter translation. But we find that they mainly focus their attention on the language features of business letter. The explicit combination of business letter translation and a translation theory is relatively less. So we will study the business letter translation by applying Nida’s theory of functional equivalence in this paper.
By functional equivalence, Nida refers to the equivalence which is firstly in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style. Nida also holds that the degree to which the receptors of the message in the receptor language respond to the TLT (Target Language Text) should be the same as the degree to which the receptors in the source language respond to the SLT (Source Language Text). In order to prove that this theory can be best applied to business letter translation, we first summarized the language features of business letter from two perspectives, namely, the perspective of function and the perspective of style. In view of function, business letter mainly has two functions, the informative function and the interpersonal function. In view of style, the stylistic features of business English language are: completeness, concreteness, clearness, conciseness, courtesy, consideration and correctness.
On the basis of the above discussion, we analyze some examples of business letter and its translation. And we do our analysis separately at the word level, the sentence level and the discourse level. This result indicates that Nida’s theory of functional equivalence can be best applied in business letter translation and functional equivalence can be achieved in both meaning and style.

Key Words: business letter, functional equivalence, lexical, syntactic, textual level