| As the pace of modern life continues to accelerate,people are faced with all kinds of physical and psychological problems such as stiffness,muscular weakness and mental tension.How to properly solve these problems and improve the quality of our daily life has become one of the focuses of people.The book Ashtanga Yoga:Practice and Philosophy systematically elaborates how to effectively release mind and body to gain a balance between them by yoga.The translation of this book can popularize certain general knowledge of yoga to yoga practitioners,and will also benefit the development of yoga in China.In translation practice,semantic translation and communicative translation theories have a wide application.Semantic translation highlights the maximum reproduction of the original text while communicative translation values readability of the translation,expecting that the readers of the translation can produce similar effects with the readers of the original text.This report is based on the author’s translation practice of Chapter 2 of Ashtanga Yoga: Practice and Philosophy.According to Newmark’s Text typology theory,yoga texts are somewhere between informative and expressive texts.Therefore,it is more appropriate to make a comprehensive application of semantic translation and communicative translation theories to guide the translation of such texts.According to the analysis,the distinct textual features for this practice in this case are as follows: There is high frequency of yoga terms and anatomical terms at lexical level as well as frequent use of passive sentences,non-restrictive attributive clause and long sentences at syntactic level;and at the discoursal level,the emphasis is laid on the cohesion and coherence of paragraphs,and the original text contains some pictures to facilitate readers’ understanding of yoga.Based on these characteristics,the author attempts to put forward some feasible translation methods.Under the guidance of semantic translation theory,literal translation and transliteration with annotations are employed at the lexical level to reproduce the content of the original accurately.At the syntactic level,the communicative translation-oriented methods mainly includes shift of sentence pattern,division and reversion.As the discoursal level,the author used the method of omitting conjunctions and concretizing the meaning of the pronoun where necessary,so as to realize the aim of cross-cultural communication.It is expected that this report can draw more attention for asthanga and bring some insights to the selection of strategies for the translation of yoga texts in the future. |
