The Appropriateness In Communicative Translation

Now we are living in a time when international exchanges in the fields of culture, politics, economy and in daily life are undergoing an upsurge with each passing day. Translation, as an important means of transcultural lingual communication, has been playing a pivotal role in the above fields.People tend to assume that any text in one language can be accurately translated into another as long as the translator uses a good bilingual dictionary. Unfortunately, languages are not so unaffected, and exact translations in many cases are difficult to achieve, if not impossible, because words have often more than one meaning, and many words are culture-bound and have no direct equivalents. Moreover, there are quite a few big differences in sentence structure and ways to express ideas, to say the least. Translation means communication, which is a kind of interlingual communication. The fact that diversities of culture and language are formidable makes translation a complex yet fascinating task.This paper consists of three chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction to the communication theory. Then a generalization of basic elements and process of communication as well as thecorrelation between communication and translation to better the understanding of the following chapters is discussed. In Chapter Two, through the theories of Nida's functional equivalence and Newmark's communicative translation, the author summarizes the definition, criteria and function of translation drawn by other scholars, for which it serves as a foil and thus puts forward the principle of appropriateness as an additional criterion for translation. The third chapter, which outweighs the other parts in length and significance, raises the main point of this thesis. Appropriateness is so foremost in communicative translation that all translation activities must follow it. This concept is exemplified and pinpointed by making researches into daily, social and artistic aspects to achieve successful communications under the principle of appropriateness. In summary, the author believes that translation should be pragmatic and appropriateness is the guiding principle in the practical application. Thus we should make great endeavors to combine translation theories with practice and bring along an artistic entity in an appropriate way.