Chinese-English Translation from the Perspective of Chinese-English Compression—A Review of Functional Equivalence Theory

The functional equivalence theory has aroused heated discussion in the field of translation. The theory of functional equivalence brings the reader’s response into the translation process, provides a new standard paradigm for the evaluation of translation, and provides important guidance and reference for translation work. However, functional equivalence theory also has some shortcomings. Based on the compression characteristics of Chinese and English, this paper complements the functional equivalence theory from four aspects: the compression of the meaning boundary, the scope of the subject of the compression, the subjective meaning of the compression and the compression process of the compression.