A Report On Translating Romance Novel I In Big City,You In Small Town From The Perspective Of Communicative Theory

The popular romance novel I in Big City,You in Small Town reaches its readers through network.It focuses on depicting the work and life of contemporary Chinese youth and serves as a window for overseas readers to take a look at the social reality of China.This report discusses translation strategies and summarizes translation experience about this practice based on case analyses.It is of great significance for improving Chinese-English translation quality of online popular novels and for promoting overseas communication of Chinese contemporary literary works.This translation practice is guided by the Communicative Translation Theory proposed by the British translation theorist Peter Newmark.The Communicative Translation Theory holds the view that the translator should try to make the effect of the translated work on the readers of the target text equal to that of the original work on the readers of the source text.Therefore,the author summarizes the three main aspects which require special attention to achieve the full transmission of information and emotion,namely,the fluency and understandability of the language,the reflection of the central ideas and the reappearance of vivid description.In terms of the fluency and understandability of the language,the author focuses on the transformation of parts of speech,the adjustment of sentence structure and the use of idiomatic English expressions.In the aspect of the reflection of the central ideas,the author analyzes the literal translation of characterization and the free translation of the extended meaning.In the aspect of the reappearance of vivid description,the author analyzes the translation of the figures of speech and the verbs that take on emotional meanings.This report is divided into four parts.The first part is description of the translation task.The author explains the source of the task and the task requirements made by the client,then summarizes the text characteristics of this novel.The second part is description of the translation process.The author describes three stages of the process,which includes pre-translation preparation,translation implementation and posttranslation proofreading.The third part is case analyses.The author outlines Peter Newmark’s Communicative Translation Theory and its applicability to this practice,then analyzes the cases from the perspective of the above-mentioned three aspects respectively.The fourth part is summary of translation practice.The author reviews and reflects on the translation practice,then summarizes the research findings and the problems that need to be further solved.