A Report On The Chinese Translation Of The Long Dark Tea-time Of The Soul Under The Guidance Of Communicative Translation Theory

The report is based on translation of excerpts of the Long Dark Tea-time of the soul written by Douglas Adams.Douglas Adams is a well-known English author,who is good at writing science fictions and fantasy detective novels.To our regret,researches on him and his works in China are few at present.In recent years,as numerous foreign excellent fantasy detective novels have enjoyed popularity around China,Douglas Adams attracts readers' attention.As one of his masterpieces,The Long Dark Tea-time of the soul mainly talks about the story of a detective called Dirk who investigates the mysterious case of his former client.It does not have a Chinese version and is of research and translation value.The fantasy detective novel is characterized by literariness,scientificity,popularity and mysteriousness.From the point of literary form,it belongs to the popular works in literature.In accordance with text typology proposed by Peter Newmark,the popular works in literature is classified as vocative function texts.Vocative function text concentrates on the response of receptors and is suitable to adopt communicative translation theory to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original.Based on the Chinese translation of The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul,this report attempts to analyze important and difficult points at the lexical and syntactic levels and propose corresponding translation skills accordingly to achieve the desired results under the guidance of communicative translation theory.Translation skills including concretizing of abstract words,addition and conversion are adopted at the lexical level while omission,sentence restructuring and change of voice are used at the syntactic level.In doing so,the report is intended to focus on the Chinese translation of fantasy detective novels,with a view to facilitating the understanding of Chinese receptors.