E-C Translation Of Dialogues In English Novels From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation Theory

The original text of this practice is the third part of the English novel The Promise written by Damon Galgut,a famous South African writer.Novel is a narrative literary genre reflecting the social reality with complete storyline and detailed description of environment and characters.Therefore,it is of great literary value and social significance to study and translate excellent foreign novels.The book,The Promise,is a narrative novel with obvious colloquial style.There are many conversations without punctuation marks,interspersed with inner monologues,which are different from the ones in ordinary novels.The dialogues of the characters in the novel play an important role in promoting the development of the plots and shaping the image of the characters.Hence,while translating dialogues in English novels into Chinese,it is necessary to seek proper translation methods to make them faithful and understandable,accordant with the expression ways of Chinese to reduce the reading obstacles for Chinese readers.After studying the literature concerning novel dialogue translation and communicative translation theory,the author chose Peter Newmark’s communicative translation as the theoretical basis of this thesis,exploring appropriate translation methods and skills to solve the difficulties occurred in this translation practice.For example,some dialogue translations are unclear in meaning,some are ambiguous in tone and some don’t reflect the characters and status of speakers.Through case study,it can be seen that translation ways like semantic extension,addition of modal particles,conversion of parts of speech and inversion can accurately express the dialogue meanings and make the translation conform to speakers’ tones,characters and status.Thus,target readers can better understand the novel,learn more about the history and culture of South Africa and have a pleasant reading experience,which shows important theoretical and practical significance.This report is divided into five parts.The first part introduces task background,research purpose and significance,research content and structure of the thesis.The second part describes the translation process including pre-translation,while-translation and post-translation.The third part is literature review about novel dialogue translation,communicative translation theory and its applicability to the translation of the novel dialogue.The fourth part is case analysis.Some translation methods guided by the chosen theory are adopted to accurately convey the dialogue meanings and tones and properly reflect speakers’ characters and status.The fifth part is the conclusion of the thesis and some reflections on the practice,including gains,limitations and directions for further improvement.