Flexibility In Newmark’s "Communicative Translation":the Case Of Translating "Will O’the Mill"

In Peter Newmark’s book Approaches to Translation, the author came up with two modes of translation which are communicative translation and semantic translation. What’s more, Newmark divided texts into three categories, the expressive, the informative, and the vocative ones. For expressive texts, semantic translation should be used, while for informative and vocative texts, communicative translation should be used (Newmark,39).This thesis is a translation commentary for "Will o’the Mill", one of the short stories of the famous English writer Robert Louis Stevenson. According to the observation of "Will o’the Mill" in the RLS Website (http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/), an authoritative website for the study of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, this source text (ST) should be categorized as a vocative function text, so that communicative translation should be applied.This article uses several examples from the ST to illustrate how to translate with flexibility in terms of both the form and the content of the original text to achieve communicative translation.Chinese and English are two distinct languages using different ways of expression. In order not to undermine the effect produced by the original text on the readers, and also to smooth over some form defects in the ST, a translator should sometimes alter the form of ST. Alterations to the text form discussed in this article are rearrangements of sentence structures and the sequence of paragraphs. More over, because of Chinese readers’ lack of English culture background, and the polysemy of some English words, a translator should be flexible when dealing with the ST’s contents as well. Pertinent strategies are amplification in translation, clarification of the extended meaning, and domesticating translation of the parable.