A Report On The Translation Of Myth&Meaning From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation

In this thesis,the translator chooses James G Head and Linda MacLea’s book Myth&Meaning as a source text and mainly discusses the major difficulties in translation and some specific translation methods adopted when solving these problems under the guidance of Peter Newmark’s communicative translation.Mythology of a people is a reflection of the collective sub-consciousness of the whole people,and the origin of the people’s philosophy,religion,and literature.Myth&Meaning comes as a pleasant surprise since it assumes that readers are not only interested in good stories about the ancient past but also that readers realize there must be more to them than just strange tales of fantastic people.Myth&Meaning provides a new understanding of mythology while at the same time offering a bit of comic relief.Diverse cultures and language structures make the translating process more difficult for the translator,and the translator believes that the target text should be fluent and readable,as an acceptable and readable version is a preface to the target readers’ further ponderation over the questions about mythology.Peter Newmark puts forward communicative translation which provides the readers with the exact communicative information of the source text after ensuring the acceptability and fluency of the target text.Besides,communicative translation gives much freedom to the translator so as to achieve a readable and acceptable version.Giving consideration to the features of Myth&Meaning,communicative translation will assist the translator in translating the source text,choosing specific translation methods and solving translation problems.The thesis gives detailed explanations of solving translation problems at the lexical,syntactic and textual levels by adopting some specific translation methods,like diction,conversion of word class,division,combination and restructuring to achieve a fluent and readable target text so as to inspire target readers’ further analyses over the questions about mythology.Moreover,it is expected that this thesis will pave the way for future research on the translation of myth.