A Report On E-C Translation Of A Dance To The Music Of Time （Excerpts） Based On Newmark’s Text Typology

The text for this practice report is selected from the novel,A Dance to the Music of Time,written by important contemporary British writer Anthony Powell.The novel is a realistic text with unique characteristic,which writes about the social changes in London in the 20th century.This work has prominent textual characteristic,with the exception of many long and difficult sentences and a slew of detailed description in appearance and poems.This novel is classified as expressive text based on Newmark’s classification of the text.As a result,when translating,the translator needs to conform to the usage of the target language,and makes the most of reproducing the original context to retain its linguistic feature.However,the author finds that using semantic translation all the time fails to communicate certain meaning,which makes the translation difficult to understand.Accordingly,it is necessary to adopt communicative translation in face of obscure narrations to adjust the original words and sentences aims to achieve the communicative function.On the basis of Newmark’s text typology,the semantic translation is always used through this text.Also,when meeting obscure expressions at discourse level,the author takes the communicative translation.Specifically,literal translation mainly adopted and free translation as supplementary method used by the author at lexical level make the translation closer to the original text,while the sequential method and four character structure mainly employed at syntactic level maximizes achieves the writer’s intention.Not only the connotation of the source text is preserved but the communicative function of textual language is retained using sequential method,recasting method,amplification and omission at discourse level.Through this translation practice,the author finds that the theory of text typology is a good guide to the translation of novels and all translation methods summarized can provide valuable references for other translators doing novel translation.