Translating Political Writings-From Perspective Of Semantic And Communicative Transalation

With China's exchanges with other nations becoming ever more regular, the need for the translation of political writings into other languages has also turned increasingly urgent. Report to the Seventeenth National Congress, as a case study of this paper, is an official document that falls into the category of political writings. Its official English translation is an exemplar of C-E translation of political writings.This paper aims at discussing methods and principles for the effective translation of political writings in light of communicative translation and semantic translation, with the result that on the one hand messages in the source text are accurately transmitted, and on the other hand, the semantic characteristics and cultural features are also well preserved. The concepts of communicative translation and semantic translation were proposed by Peter Newmark, an English translation theorist, in his Approaches to Translations. Newmark also divided texts into three different kinds, which are expressive text, informative text and vocative text. He proposed communicative translation and semantic translation. The former focuses essentially upon the comprehension and response of TL receptors, while the latter centers around the semantic aspects of the SL texts. Political writings fall into the expressive text category, but at the same time, it exhibits a distinctive linguistic style, with rich semantic and syntactic features, and cultural elements, etc. Therefore, this paper argues that flexible strategies should be adopted in the translation of political writings. It is recommended that the whole piece should be considered essential and when translating political writings, communicative translation should be used to accurately transmit the messages the source texts contain, while semantic translation should be adopted to retain the linguistic and cultural features of the source texts.