At the start, Nida’s functional equivalence theory is only linguistic construction, but latter, it pays more attention to the other elements, such as the social element, culture elements and the receptors’ response. Nida thinks that there is no essential difference of different languages in conveying content but in expressions. Traditionally, it is so restricted that the quality of versions is decided at the standard of an objective text, but Nida gives the right to receptors, taking their responses as the criteria. Regarding readers reaction, textual analysis is far from enough, the culture environment the reader being in should be taken into consideration. Nida’s attitude towards culture also affects translation theories a lot. He confirmed the close relationship between language and culture, since being part of the culture, language is also an indispensable tool to understand and study culture systematically. He believed that the contradiction between language and culture is the basic contradiction between language and culture. Many mistakes in translation are in the cultural level rather than the linguistic level. Therefore, specific culture background needs to be combined in the process of translation when dealing with the language. Sometimes, culture adaptation should be made to realize the equivalence of communicative function of language. The writer regards the obstacles of culture much bigger than those of language itself. After all, language is part o f culture, so translating between languages equals to translating between cultures in a sense. Because of the stability and exclusiveness of national culture, translating the culture-loaded elements properly from source language to target language provide challenges for the translator to adopt respective strategies depending on specific satiations.
Ye Zinan summarizes Nida’s functional equivalence in three parts. (叶子南,2008) abandon traditional concept of the part of speech; this is the main reference to the transferring the part of speech .2)use the concept of core sentence and sentence transformation to overcome the restriction of syntax;3)use the theory of isomorphism to overcome the obstacles caused by culture differences. The concept of isomorphism, derived from Semiotics, emphasis that symbols have certain meanings under specific circumstances. In summary, Nida’ s functional equivalence theory includes linguistic elements(semantics, part of speech, syntax) and extra-linguistic elements(society, culture, phycology)