A Report On The Translation Of A Gift Of Hope:Helping The Homeless (Excerpts) Under The Guidance Of The Theory Of Semantic And Communicative Translation

The author of the report analyzes the translation of the memoir based on the translation of A Gift of Hope:Helping the Homeless written by the renowned American writer Danielle Steel. The source text describes a true story that for eleven years Danielle Steel and her team have been devoted to aiding the homeless on the streets. This source text is characterized by the simple and plain language with literariness and authenticity. Also, the source text boasts its expressive function, informative function and vocative function. Therefore, the author of the report chooses the theory of semantic and communicative translation put forward by Peter Newmark, a renowned British translation theorist, as the guiding theory in the English-Chinese translation of the source text.This report is intended to analyze the cases to probe into the application of semantic translation and communicative translation in this translation in terms of words and phrases, specific sentences, figures of speech and cultural elements. As for the application of semantic translation, the author of the report makes three suggestions as to the translation: pondering the meanings of the words and phrases to render the contents of the source text, retaining the features of sentence patterns so as to be faithful to the style of the original text as much as possible and reproducing the original figures of speech with some appropriate explanations. In terms of the application of communicative translation, the author of the report comes up with such proposals as omitting some words and phrases to enhance the expressive force of the translated text, restructuring specific sentences to deal with the differences between English and Chinese, and making some annotations to convey the cultural connotations.Through this report, the author of the report respectively talks about the application of semantic translation and communicative translation in the English-Chinese translation of the memoir. It is hoped that this report can provide the future related studies with some references.