A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo(Excerpt) Under The Guidance Of Communicative Translation Theory

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a modern novel written by the American author Taylor Jenkins Reid.It records Evelyn’s seven marriages in chronological order and discloses the realities behind these marriages.This novel seems to revolve around Evelyn’s love story,but it explains the definition of family and true love in a profound way.Regardless of tradition,Evelyn lives unconstrained by the normal rules of society.With her rich life experience,Evelyn Hugo becomes eventually committed to pursuing liberation and gradually finds her self-identity.In accordance with Peter Newmark’s text typology,The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo,as popular fiction,belongs to a vocative text.Since the source text includes some news reports,which are classified as informative text,it also features informativeness.According to the characteristics of vocative and informative texts,communicative translation is applicable and feasible when coping with the rendering of the source text.Given that English and Chinese belong to two totally different language systems,the translator is supposed to take differences behind languages,such as cultural elements and logical thoughts,into consideration.Therefore,the author of this report applies communicative translation strategies at lexical,syntactic and textual levels in translating the original text.Based on the translation of an excerpt from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo,this translation report explores the guiding role that communicative translation has played in this practice.In the process of translation,the author of this report,under the guidance of the communicative translation theory,reproduced the original text as popular fiction in Chinese by using translation methods at different levels.At the lexical level,the translator uses such methods as the conversion of part of the speech,amplification,omission,idiomatic expressions and selection of the meaning of polysemes.At the syntactic level,the translator tries to apply the methods of division and restructuring to make the target text more fluent.And at the textual level,the translator turns to the cohesive devices put forward by Halliday and Hasan to make the target text as natural as possible,thus producing an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the original text reader.The translation practice does not completely preserve the form or structure of the original text,for the translator holds the view that it gives the highest priority to the target reader,which is in line with the basic principle of Peter Newmark’s communicative translation.