Translation Of Figures Of Speech From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation

Language is a tool of expressing thoughts, and figure of speech is an artful form of language, and translation is the bridge of mental and cultural communication. There exist a large number of figures of speech in both Chinese and English. As a kind of language phenomenon in the two languages, figure of speech is considered as the carrier of language and culture. Figures of speech are not only used to make language more vivid, more explicit and more symmetrical, but also to enhance the expressiveness and attraction of language, and to gain the readers’attention and assonance.Scholars from home and abroad have made abundant researches on figures of speech and their translation, including the origin and development, the structure and features, the function and principles, and translation methods of figures of speech, etc. At the same time, plenty of theories in linguistics and translation are also applied into the translation of figures of speech. Thus, translation of figures of speech has been an indispensible branch of the whole fields of translation. With the development of communication between China and western countries, foreign films and TV classics which are considered as forms of popular culture attract more and more attention of the public. While former scholars’studies of the translation of figures of speech are limited in literature works, translation of figures of speech in TV classics plays an increasingly important role in communication so as to lessen the misunderstanding between cultures and help people get a better knowledge of foreign culture and customs.The reason why the translation of figures of speech works as the research object of this thesis is:figures of speech are the essence of language and they are believed to be the difficult point in translation. And figures of speech are full of information that is perhaps not important in quantity but in quality.This thesis tries to make research on the translation of figures of speech. And the innovation of this thesis lies in:The study tentatively applies Peter Newmark’s Communicative Translation in analyzing the translation of figures of speech in TV works. From the perspective of equivalent effect in translation, scholars find that semantic translation cannot get equivalence of meaning and function, and communicative translation is workable for compensation of the weakness of semantic translation. Also, communicative translation presents the same feeling and experience for target language readers as the source language readers. Based on this, the thesis takes a case study of popular American soap opera Desperate Housewives and makes a detailed analysis of its translation of figures of speech. And translation strategies of figures of speech in Desperate Housewives reflect three translation principles of figures of speech, namely, accuracy and economy principle, comprehensibility principle, and equivalence of effect principle, which proves that communicative translation theory is applicable in figures of speech translation.The significance of this study is to make suggestions for further learning, appreciating and translating figures of speech and to offer help for English learners to get more knowledge of western language, culture and customs.