The Study of Semantic Functional Equivalence of Predicates in Xi Youji and Its English Version Journey to the West—From the Perspective of Transitivity Theory

Equivalence in translation was first put forward by Firth. It has been the nuclear topic of translation studies in western countries."Functional equivalence", Eugene Nida’s key notion of translation theories, advocated the receptor-oriented translation standard. Through the contrastive study between Xi Youji and its English version Journey to the West, the content focuses on the translation of the verbal predicates and aims at studying the application of transitivity theory into Chinese-English translation and finding out the improved translations of Chinese and English examples of different processes. Due to limited article, this paper only discusses three of six processes in the concrete context and provides new translations for the questioned ones. Finally, the last part summarizes that the functional equivalence can be achieved when verbs referring to process of action share the same semantic attribute with the Chinese originals, so the English version of Xi Youji should be further perfected according to transitivity theory.