A Report On E-C Translation Of The Fallen Leaves(Excerpts)under The Guidance Of Communicative Translation

The source text of this report is an excerpt from The Fallen Leaves written by British novelist William Wilkie Collins.This detective novel tells a series of mysteries triggered by a kidnapped infant 16 years ago.The translation material belongs to foreign popular literature.It emphasizes on the readership,so the translation is supposed to be easy-to-understand and accessible for target readers.In the translation process,the translator mainly encountered two kinds of problems.The problems at lexical level are: how to deal with polysemy phenomenon,how to reproduce the image of the protagonist and how to achieve semantic cohesion.While the problems at syntactic level are: how to get rid of translationese,how to narrow the gap between English and Chinese in syntactic structure and how to achieve coherence of the text.Considering these problems,the translator has taken Newmark’s communicative translation theory as a guidance to analyze how to make the target readers have the same reading experience as the original readers and how to convey the communicative effect of the target text from lexical level and syntactic level.To settle the above problems at lexical level,the translator has selected the translation strategy of contextualization,amplification and application of four-character structure.As for problems at syntactic level,the translator has adopted translation strategies of free translation,voice conversion and restructuring.Through this translation practice,this paper concludes that communicative translation theory is applicable to translation of the popular novel: the fallen leaves.In rendering the popular novel,the translator should emphasize on achieving communicative effect and adopt appropriate translation methods to bridge the language gap,thus,making the target text light,smooth and natural.