A Brief Analysis On The Usage Of Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation In Translating Bestselling Novels

This thesis covers two parts, the translation part and the commentary part. The translation material is excerpted from the novel Springwater Seasons, a bestselling novel written by an American novelist, Linda Lael Miller. While the analyses, comparisons, discussions, demonstrations and summaries in the commentary part are made based on the translation. According to Peter Newmark’s translation theory, a translator should, in consideration of the textual characteristics and translation requirements, alternatively employ semantic method and communicative method with flexibility. This paper seeks to translate the excerpted novel by utilizing the semantic and communicative methods, and then analyze and sum up the difficulties arising from translating the words, fixed expressions, figures of speech and sentences. Through analyzing and researching, it has found that both semantic and communicative methods are well applicable in the E-C translation of bestselling novels, the version rendered by flexibly using the two methods would be faithful, smooth and idiomatic, thus the quality of translation are markedly improved.