| As PLA Navy is moving towards the deep blue ocean,recent years have witnessed an increasing number of its international interactions and multinational operations as well as other tasks.Military biographies,an important medium to learn about senior foreign officers and military history,provide researchers on foreign navy with valuable references.Interspersing narration with comments,the book Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty: The Last Naval Hero shows readers the British social life,naval history,seamanship of the commanding officers during World War I through an account of the hero,Admiral of the Fleet David Beatty’s life experience and career,and the comments on his historic achievements.Through the lens of Peter Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation,the translator1 takes Chapter 8 of the biography as his sample of study to explore the translation techniques of military biography.According to Newmark’s theory,by semantic translation,the translation process should center on the source language(SL)and its culture,which presents target readers the style of the source text by faithfully conveying its original effect and the author’s2original intention;by communicative translation,the translation process should zoom in on the target language and its culture so that the target texts can bring a comfortable reading experience to target readers through clearly and fluently expounding the source text.As military biographies,featuring historicity and literariness,are full of military contents,flexible employment of semantic translation and communicative translation is needed in the translation process.Its goal is to seek a balance between faithfulness to the source text and its target readers.Taking the two translation methods as the framework,this report puts forward some concrete techniques to clarify that both methods are instructive for translating military biographies.By semantic translation,specific techniques include “retaining syntactic structure”,“preserving language styles” and “restoring metaphorical devices”,while under communicative translation,they are summarized as “reinventing sentence structures”,“employing common collocations”,“adopting explicitation”,“adding annotations” and “correcting erroneous information”.Besides,the report offers useful reference to other translators by placing the importance of such approaches as familiarizing oneself with background information,sorting out crucial military elements,using parallel texts for reference,resorting to Machine Translation and drawing a draft of military forces movements. |
