A Report On The E-C Translation Of Dear Fatty

This report takes Dear Fatty,an epistolary memoir by a British comedian Dawn French,as the translation material.Guided by Peter Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation theory,this report analyzes the methods of memoir translation.Memoir is a kind of literature recalling personal experience and social activities,which generally boasts authenticity,vividness and epochal character.Celebrity memoirs mostly share how to face setbacks and ups and downs of life,conveying their positive attitudes towards life.The positive attitude towards life in contemporary society is very conducive to the public,so translating celebrity memoirs has practical significance.In general,celebrity memoirs strongly show personal writing style of the original author,therefore,translators should keep the style and characteristics of the original author when translating them,so as to depict a real original author to the target readers,and make target readers get the same feelings as the original readers do.In order to achieve these goals,it is practical to apply semantic and communicative translation theory to guiding the translation of celebrity memoirs.According to Peter Newmark’s opinion,semantic translation attempts to reduce the translation units,that is,to focus on words and sentences.It emphasizes the contextual meaning to convey the author’s personal emotions and thinking process,so as to retain the original flavor.Communicative translation is reader-oriented.It highlights the idiomaticness and fluency of the translated language,following the norm of the target language.Different from semantic translation,communicative translation focuses on the effect of information delivery,and aims to help readers lessen the reading obstacles.Frequent use of figurative rhetoric,repetition and parallelism in Dear Fatty reflects the style and writing characteristics of the original work,and at the same time reflects the thinking process of the original author.What’s more,due to the differences in expression,the history and culture between English and Chinese,equivalent Chinese expressions of the widely employed alliterations and idioms in Dear Fatty are not available.In view of these characteristics,the translator applies transplantation and imitation under the guidance of semantic translation.In order to maintain the original author’s writing style and characteristics,the translator keeps the original author’s unique metaphorical vehicle and imitates the original author’s repetition and parallelism.Meanwhile,in order to provide the target readers the same feeling as that of the original readers,offer a more authentic translation,and reduce reading obstacles for the target readers,the translator applies the techniques of amplification,compensation,and paraphrase under the guidance of communicative translation,the purpose of which is to amplify the implied information,compensate the effect of alliterations,and paraphrase the idioms.In this translation practice,the translator applies Newmark’s translation theory to the translation of celebrity memoirs and employs five specific translation methods under the semantic translation and communicative translation theory.Proposed under semantic translation and communicative translation,the methods fit with the characteristics of celebrity memoirs,portraying the true image of the original author to the target readers and providing a better translation practice,suggestions and references for the translation of celebrity memoirs.