Thanks to translations, varies cultures are allowed to exchange with one another. One the one hand, this has been promoting the studies of translation. On the other hand, this poses huge challenges on translators, because it is hard to define what is a good target translation when a source text is translated. There is a variety of standards to evaluate the quality of a translation, among which equivalence seems to be the most controversial one. On the analysis of studies on equivalence, this essay discusses the role of equivalence in the practice of translating with illustrations of Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation. Indeed, to translate a source text into a target one is based on the equivalence among languages. However, in the process of translating, it can be adjusted to some extent for the sake of the acceptability in the target culture.