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Chapter Five  Conclusion

The translator has translated three chapters of Coffee for Dummies with the guidance of Functional Equivalence Theory. During this process, much experience was gained, and even the mistakes made in the draft text could provide valuable lessons for future works. Thus hopefully, it can serve as a reference for future studies in the translation field. 

To begin with, guided by Functional Equivalence Theory, the translator adopted a range of translation methods from conversion and inversion to paraphrasing and amplification, etc., at three different levels, namely the lexical level, the syntactic level, and the textual level. Meanwhile, the translator noticed that fully achieving functional equivalence is an ideal concept. Sometimes, due to cultural differences, it is almost impossible to make the target and source readers have the same response when they receive the same information.

Furthermore, the translator learned more about how difficult it is to render an intelligible and readable target text during the translation process. After translating the source text for the first time, the translator discovered that there were many rigid sentences that needed to be improved further. This experience prompted the translator to invest more efforts into the pre-translation and in-translation stages the next time, in order to save energy in the later stages. To elaborate, the translator needs to do more research online to learn about the main subject or topic in the source text, especially if it is something highly specialized. Furthermore, when translating a reference book, it’s important for the translator to use the most understandable language to convey the information from the source text; otherwise, the work will be considered a failure because the book users will not have a clear concept.

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