The Application Of Semantic And Communicative Translation In The E-C Translation Of Narrative Non-fictions

Narrative non-fiction is a literary item for a text that combines both documentary and literary features, presenting true historical or current real-life stories written in literary language and a style more closely associated with fiction. The writer pays close attention to elements of language style, plot structure, character development and themes to make the story as compelling as possible to the readers. In recent years, many outstanding foreign narrative non-fiction books have become great successes in the whole world, and it is a major challenge for translators to translate these works into Chinese successfully and let Chinese readers enjoy these works to the fullest.Through a good Chinese translated version of a foreign narrative non-fiction work, Chinese readers can not only be exposed to more historical, cultural and social information but also get the chance to appreciate the aesthetic value of literature. However, currently, there are just a few studies focusing on the Chinese translation of foreign narrative non-fiction works. Thus, it is both necessary and important to conduct a study concerning this topic. Based on the English-Chinese translation practice of the America non-fiction work Behind the Beautiful Forevers-Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, the author of this thesis tried to cope with the difficulties met during the translation by adopting the semantic and communicative translation theory and the text typology theory presented by Peter Newmark and further discuss the application of semantic and communicative translation theory to the translation of narrative non-fiction works.Based on the translation practice and theoretical study, the author suggested that semantic translation be adopted to render the exact contextual meaning and language style of the original text while communicative translation be used to overcome those difficulties in translation caused by different syntactic structures, grammar rules and modes of expression between English and Chinese as well as the cultural differences between India and China so as to make the translated version more accpetable and appealing to Chinese readers.