On Translation Of Autobiography From The Perspective Of Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation Theory

Autobiography is an important literary genre with both authenticity and literariness.It is an effective record form of characters or character data,which is of great significance to study the changes of history and times.Among them,as a sub category of biographies,biographies with important political figures as the protagonists are not only an important way for readers to learn and understand history,but also provide rich materials for the study of economic and social development and international politics in different countries.The main difficulty of autobiographical translation lies in how to combine authenticity and literariness.This requires the translator to start from the specific situation of the original work,refer to the requirements of context and style,follow the principle of authenticity as much as possible,and retain the visual expression in the autobiographical text,so that the target readers can get the same inspiration and feeling as the original readers.It coincides with Newmark’s Semantic Translation and Communicative Translation Theory.Semantic Translation and Communicative Translation Theory is one of the most important contributions of the famous translator and translation theorist Peter Newmark.Semantic Translation attaches importance to accurately reproducing the contextual meaning of the original text,while Communicative Translation means that the effect of the translated text on the target readers should be equal to that of the original text on the original readers.Because the autobiographical text has the characteristics of the combination of authenticity and literariness,the comprehensive use of Semantic Translation and Communicative Translation strategies in the translation process has strong feasibility and scientificness,which can accurately express the meaning and improve the communicative effect of the translation at the same time.In view of this,this thesis intends to make a more in-depth study on the autobiographical translation on the basis of the Semantic Translation and Communicative Translation Theory,taking the Seychelles Global Citizen:The Autobiography of the Founding President of the Republic of Seychelles as an example,in order to explore effective translation strategies,so as to be faithful to the original text and meet the cultural expectations of target language reader research purposes and significance as well as the whole outline of the thesis.Chapter Two is a literature review of Semantic Translation and Communicative Translation and autobiographical translation at home and abroad.Chapter Three combs the theoretical framework of this study,which covers the origin and development,main concepts and feasibility.Chapter Four mainly analyzes the features of autobiography,the content and language characteristics of the selected text.Chapter Five analyzes and discusses the feasible translation strategies in autobiographical translation from the perspective of Semantic Translation and Communicative Translation Theory.It is found that transliteration,literal translation and reservation can be adopted in the translated text under the guidance of Semantic Translation,while free translation,conversion,four-character phraseology,addition,omission and restructuring can be adopted under the guidance of Communicative Translation.Chapter Six summaries the major findings and points out the limitations and directions for future research.