A Study On The C-E Translation Of Christophe On This Shore From The Perspective Of Newmark’s Semantic And Communicative Translation

Within the framework of Newmark’s translation theory, which holds that "semantic translation is used for expressive texts, communicative for informative and vocative texts," the present study explores how to apply semantic translation to Mu Xin’s expressive text-typed writing Christophe On This Shore. The research is carried out at the lexical, syntactical and contextual levels, and finally comes to some useful conclusions which have practical implications.When rendering expressive texts, a translator must pay special attention to those elements which carry the author’s personal traits, such as his creative collocations, metaphors, sentence patterns, wording, etc. These are all the author’s personal "stamps", which should be well preserved. No matter how awkward an expressive ST may seem to be, it is still better to use the method of semantic translation, since the translated version can not only transmit the thought process of the author but also keep his unique flavor.In most cases, semantic translation can be fully realized in an expressive text. But special attention should be paid to the ironic expressions and the cases where there is no affinity between the ST and TT languages. In such cases, the appropriate method is communicative translation, rather than semantic translation.