A Study On Translation Of City Publicity Under Newmark’s Text Typology

With the rapid development of China’s economy, the further opening-up to the outside world, and the pace of global economic integration speeding up, China’s international status and influence is progressing day by day, all kinds of economic and cultural exchanges with foreign countries are becoming more frequent, and publicity is of obviously great necessity and importance. External propaganda also called publicity is aimed to let the world know China and familiarize China with the outside world. Publicity translation, with the purpose of propagandizing China, with foreign audience as its target readers, is a kind of publicity and a special kind of translation. Needless to say, to a great extent, the quality of publicity translation directly determines the effect of the publicity work.Text typology clarifying the relationship between the function of text type and translation strategy from the perspective of language features, closely integrating translation with text function, is one of the important theories of functionalism translation school. As a master of translation theory and practice, Peter Newmark, the British famous translation theorist and practitioner, based on the forerunners of the theory of functional linguistics, according to different content and text, divides all texts into three basic types: informative text, expressive text and vocative text. On this basis, Newmark puts forward two translation strategies-- “semantic translation” and “communicative translation”. Newmark argues that different text should use different translation strategy. Semantic translation based on the form of the original text and the original intention of the author, is usually applicable to the translation of scientific and technological literature and literary discourse; while communicative translation conveying information mainly according to the lingual, cultural and pragmatic features of the target language, usually applies to textbooks, public notices, news reports, and other forms of non-literature translation. In other words, semantic translation focuses on the translation of expressive text, and communicative translation focuses on the translation of informative text and vocative text.The theory of text typology provides an effectively theoretical basis for publicity translation. Brief introduction to cities, as popular reading materials for city external propaganda, one kind of publicity materials, is aimed to communicate and convey information. As brief introduction to cities has the features of informative text and vocative text, communicative translation strategy has practical guidance for its translation. From the perspective of Newmark’s text typology theory, taking A Brief Introduction to Nanchang City as its corpus, this thesis analyzes the function and type of city publicity materials, combines the characteristics of this type of text, discusses the translation strategies and methods of city publicity text on the basis of the specific case from translation practice, and studies the application of communicative translation strategy in city publicity translation. This thesis summarizes the author’s discovery and experience in the translation practice, and is aimed at providing reference and guidance for the future translation practice.Through the comparative analysis and translation practice, the author finds that in the process of translation, translators should first determine the text type before flexibly selecting appropriate translation methods such as literal translation, liberal translation, addition,deletion and conversion according to the specific function of text so as to make the translation close to the target readers to achieve the ideal effect of translation.