A Report On English-chinese Translation Of Exit West (Excerpts) Based On Newmark's Text Typology

This is a translation report.The translation project is to translate chapter four to chapter seven of the novel Exit West into Chinese.Due to the outbreak of the civil war in Syria and the rising of Islamic State,refugees and immigrants have become hot topics.Against this background,the novel tells the story of a young couple's escape from their war-torn hometown through mysterious doors leading to foreign lands.The author Mohsin Hamid is a novelist with dual nationalities of Pakistan and Britain.He was shortlisted for the 2017 British Booker Awards for this novel.This translation project aims to assist Chinese readers to understand the situation of the current world and refugees,and respond appropriately to refugee problems.The source text Exit West belongs to informative text type,expressive text type and vocative text type,with an emphasis on the informative text type.Following Newmark's text typology,the translator mainly adopted communicative translation,supplemented by semantic translation.The narrations of plots and descriptions of main characters are the main body of this novel.The author objectively narrated the story of a young couple's escape from the perspective of the third person,taking time as an order.The development of the events is the information that the author wants to transmit,which belongs to informative text type.Among them,the language of part of these texts is very contagious,aiming to infect and resonate with readers.Therefore,this part of the text is also vocative.The translator mainly adopted communicative translation for the informative and vocative text.Specifically speaking,at the lexical level,the author tended to use common words to narrate and describe things,and the translator used techniques like converting word classes and using four-character structures.At the sentence level,the source text includes a large number of compound sentences and subordinate clauses.The translator adopted techniques like splitting long sentences and rearranging sentence structures.At the discourse level,the logical relationship of the source text is clear and cohesive words like pronouns and conjunctions are used to form the text.The translator tended to make the references ofpronouns explicit or omit cohesive markers.In addition,those words and paragraphs with strong personal styles of the author belong to expressive text.Semantic translation was applied by the translator.Specifically,at the lexical level,the translator directly translated the meaning of those special words.At the sentence level,the author tended to use rhetorical devices in the novel,like simile,metaphor and personification.The translator employed literal translation.At the discourse level,there are many cohesive markers like temporal words,which have syntactic meanings and cannot be omitted.The translator mainly used literal translation.Through this translation practice,the translator has got the following experience:communicative translation and semantic translation can effectively guide the translation of novels.Communicative translation pays more attention to readability of target texts and reading experience of readers.It is used to translate objective narrations and descriptions in a novel.Additionally,semantic translation pays more attention to forms and aesthetic effects of source texts.It is applied to translate texts with distinct writing characteristics of the author in a novel.The application of these two methods achieves different effects.