A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Romance Novel I In Big City,You In Small Town From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation Theory

In recent years,Chinese online popular novels,especially romance novels,have gained great popularity due to their light style and appealing plot.I in Big City,You in Small Town is a typical one mentioned above which mainly talks about Yang Xi’s work and her love story.Yang,the heroine of this novel,returns to her hometown and meets her former classmate Tao Yuan after working in a big city for years.They have overcome a variety of obstacles for the sake of love.The romance novel is close to the real life.Thus,the C-E translation of the romance novel can not only provide convenience for English readers,but also offer them an opportunity to understand the professional and personal life of modern women in China.Under the guidance of Peter Newmark’s Communicative Translation theory,the author chooses several translation techniques,such as word amplification,sentence restructuring and text amplification to accomplish the translation practice after taking the characteristics of the romance novel into consideration.The novel,I in Big City,You in Small Town,mainly targets general readers and is filled with oral and colloquial expressions.The meaning of words in the novel is highly flexible,which contains associative meanings.Besides,the novel is full of verbs and short sentences that are connected without conjunctions.These characteristics require the author to take both the original meaning of the novel and the accessibility of readership into account in the translating process.Newmark’s Communicative Translation theory focuses on the exact meaning of the original and stresses the accessibility of translation to readers.It also involves discussions about translation strategies and techniques from the perspectives of word,sentence and text.Therefore,the author chooses this theory as the guidance of the translation practice.On the word level,the author adds words that can promote readers’ understanding of the original text and tries to maintain the associative meanings of words.Besides,the author selects appropriate expressions to retain the meaning of Chinese idioms after taking the context into consideration.Concerning sentence translation,the author uses several translation techniques and makes flexible adjustments.The author emphasizes the characters’ emotional changes in the novel by choosing the appropriate subject.Additionally,the author restructures sentences and uses various forms like prepositions,infinitives and participles to translate verbs.On the text level,the author adds sentences to provide readers with background information and uses cohesive devices like conjunctions and adverbs to enhance the coherence of the text.The report can be divided into four parts,namely task description,procedure description,cases analysis and summarization.The author makes an analysis of the typical cases in the aspects of word,sentence and text.The final part includes a summary of the translation practice and plans for the future study.