| Bible is "a mysterious book which has precious value and vital significance in many aspects. Theologians regard it as an unrivaled religious classic; historians as a rare literature on history in the world; writers as a collection of literary works" (Zhang Chaoke 2003:1).There are more than one billion people or so who see the Bible as their spiritual nutrition all over the world.(Liang Gong 1990:preface). And it is a book which has the most versions and the widest market and the largest readership in the whole world.The Chinese Bible translation constitutes an indispensable branch of the Bible translation in the world. It has been more than 1,300 years since the first Chinese Bible version came into existence. During the history of Chinese Bible translation, its significant influence on Chinese culture has never been negligible. However, very few people know how it has developed in China and that a variety of versions were produced during this long and important history still remains unfamiliar to many people.This thesis detailedly and methodically introduces the development process of Bible translation in China and discusses the main Chinese versions in different history periods with distinct intentions, principles and features. Among them, Chinese Union Version (the CUV) and Today's Chinese Version (the TCV) are two representatives. Both of them employed English versions as their textual bases (Revised King James Version and Today's English Version respectively). Since the publishment of the CUV in 1919, it has been the most popular Chinese version. Also, for most Chinese readers, the Chinese Bible just equals the CUV. The TCV is the product of a group of Chinese experts in the 1970s, aiming at Chinese non-Christians which made up the majority of Chinese population. As to the contrast and analysis of the two important Chinese versions, few people study and discuss them by Peter Newmark's translatlion theory; many people did their study from other angles, such as literature, Bible culture and teaching, narrative semiotics, "dynamic equivalence" by Nida, Skopostheorie, etc. Thereupon, this thesis is intended to probe into the application of semantic and communicative translation put forward by Peter Newmark in the above-mentioned versions, then prove that this application is effective and valid.In Newmark's theory, semantic translation (ST) and communicative translation (CT) comprise the weightiest and the most distinctive components. ST emphasizes on translating everything into the Target Language (TL) without even changing the sequence and format of words and sentences in the Source Language (SL).The translator translates the text word by word free from considering the acceptability and cultural background of the TL readership. On the other hand, CT pays more attention to the conveying of the key information of the SL into the TL. The purpose of doing so is to have a good communication with the readers of the TL. The authoress believes that they two are reciprocally complementary, so only by combination with each other, can better and more effective guidence to the translation activities be conducted.Finally, the authoress also proposes some limitations of the application, and tries to provide some possible suggestions for further research. With the maturity of the translation theories, we have every reason to believe that more and better Chinese Bible versions will appear in the near future.
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