Hongmei Chen, Youliang Xie

Hongmei Chen

November 28, 2025

Functional equivalence, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”, Children’s literature translation.

Eugene Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory emphasizes achieving functional equivalence between source and target texts, enabling target readers to experience the text similarly to source readers. By using “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” as a case study, this paper explores into how functional equivalence guides children’s literature translation across three levels: lexical, syntactic and stylistic levels. By analyzing some concrete examples, it illustrates how the Chinese version achieves functional equivalence while adapting to children’s cognitive characteristics and reading habits.

© 2025, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license