The Communication Load In E-C Translation Of Children’s Literature

Information Theory was found by C.E Shannon in1948. Since its birth, the basicprinciples in the theory were widely used in many fields. Eugene A. Nida, an Americantranslation theorist applied it in translation and put forward the idea to combine themtogether. In the process of information transmission, the efficiency lies on the relationshipbetween communication load and channel capacity. Communication load refers to theamount of the information contained in a message. In Nida’s model of the translationprocess, it was defined as the degree of difficulty of a message. Communication loadconsists of formal load and semantic load. The former includes collocations of words,syntax and the author’s unique writing technique, etc; the latter mainly refers to words,word collocation and the theme to be transmitted. Channel capacity refers to theacceptability to the information, namely, channel acceptability. The Information Theoryadvances that：in the case of a certain channel capacity, a message with too much oldinformation cannot satisfy the receptor’s needs; on the contrary, a message with too muchnew information will go beyond the receptor’s decoding capacity and causecommunication overload. In translation, this overload mainly expresses that thetranslation is beyond the reader’s decoding capacity and needs them spend too muchenergy in understanding the translation.Children’s literature is important for children’s growth. The translation of children’s literature has a long history in China and attracted many scholars. This thesis applies thecommunication load in Information Theory to the translation of children’s literature andtries to discuss the translation of children’s literature from a new perspective. Based on acase study of Ma Ainong’s translation—Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, thethesis gives a detailed analysis of the realization of the two elements of communicationload in the translation and explores the inspirations of communication load in translatingchildren’s literature. Through the research, it can be found that: the translators canproduce translations which are fond by children readers only by starting from thelanguage characteristics of children’s literature and children’s psychological features.