An Analysis Of The Economist In The Light Of The Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation

Established in1943, The Economist boasts a long history of over160years. Mainly concerned with the political and business news, the magazine enjoys a high reputation worldwide in the fields of politics and economics. Its wide range of vocabulary and idiomatic expressions compounds the difficulty in understanding it, therefore many Chinese students preparing the postgraduate entrance examination regard it as an useful tool to improve their English, as well as those learning English for interests. This thesis focuses on93articles published on the Column Britain, America and China in the fourth quarter of The Economist in2013. After an extensive reading and in-depth analysis, the author finds that those words concerning politics and economy appear frequently, as well as the expressions relating to idiom, slang and rhetoric.This paper attempts to explore the text types and translation principles according to Newmark’s communicative translation and semantic translation. On the basic of Buhler’s language function theory, Newmark makes further development and classifies the texts into three types expressive types, informative typed and vocative types. Meanwhile, all of those text types may exist altogether in one text. According to his categorization of the text types, The Economist, as the news report, goes to expressive texts. The author analyzes the translation of The Economist from four aspects, that is, lexical characteristics, grammatical characteristics, figures of speech and cultural elements, and then briefly concludes the translation strategies suitable for the translation of The Economist in light of semantic and communicative translation. The essence of translation lies in the accurate transmission of the original meaning, thus, the author holds the semantic translation should be mainly practiced in translating the material concerning lexical and grammatical characteristics to avoid misunderstanding and ambiguity in comprehension, as the semantic translation tries to reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the author within the constraints of grammar and linguistic structure. However, as the rhetoric speeches and cultural elements mainly involve style and background knowledge, communicative translation should be adopted so that TL readers can share esthetic value of source culture. Meanwhile, as long as conflicts occur, translators have no choice but to sacrifice the communicative translation to ensure the accurate transmission of the original meanings.