A Study Of The Chinese Translation Of The Power Of Our Words Under The Guidance Of Text-Typology Theory

Katharina Reiss proposed the Text-Typology and classified source texts into four types: informative content-focused texts, expressive form-focused texts, operative appeal-focused texts and audio medial texts. In a specific translation situation, there is often more than one type in a certain text, so it is necessary to use different translation methods according to the different text features involved in the situation.Under the guidance of Text-Typology, this thesis has studied the Chinese translation of The Power of Our Words, a small popular book on psychology written by the Canadian female writer Liz McGrath. The thesis first analyzes the text-types of the book, and, according to its content and text features, classifies it into a text combined with content-focused texts and appeal-focused texts, and with some characteristics of the form-focused text. Then, on the basis of the text features of the book, the thesis summarizes three principles for its translation, including the principle of focusing on content and being concise and clear for the informative text, the principle of focusing on form and being faithful to the original for the expressive text, and the principle of focusing on appeal and seeking effect equivalence for the operative text. In accordance with these principles, sentences and paragraphs from the book with different text features are translated and analyzed. The result shows that the principles have worked very well in the translation of the text and produced effect as expected.