An Application Of The Theories Of Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation In Obituaries

In Western countries, an obituary is a kind of literary form with rich content, diversified forms, and in which a sincere feeling is expressed, sad but not sorrowful. Obituaries usually occupy a large part of space of news in magazine or newspapers, covering various kinds of people, such as celebrities and ordinary people. Readers can learn a great deal by reading such kinds of obituaries, so they become a wide audience for reading obituaries in Western media. The writer selected some obituaries from 9 issues of The Economist as the text for translation, in which the writer applied some translation methods to handling certain translation problems such as the complex sentence structures, the differences between Chinese and Westerners in ideas and language styles expressed in reports. In this paper, the writer adopted the theories of semantic translation and communicative translation proposed by Newmark, Finally, the writer managed to accomplish the effective translation results by applying the theories of communicative translation and semantic translation, analyzing from aspects of retaining original’s sentence pattern to keep its language style, explaining appropriately to reproduce the original’s rhetorical connotation, taking idiomatic translation to convey culture and habit connotation, taking free translation to strengthen language expressive force, and dealing with the differences of syntactic structure by splitting and reconstruction.