Translation Of Popular Novels Under The Guidance Of Peter Newmark's Translation Theory

There has long been a debate over whether translation belongs to the category of art or science. In China, the practice of translation started as early as Han dynasty due to the needs of translating Buddhist texts. The four major climaxes in China's translation history witnessed the prosperity of translation. However, since most translation practitioners regarded translation as an art, development of translation theory has been stagnant for quite a long time. To this day, there remains a imbalance in China between the development of practice and theory. As the Western translation theories are introduced into China, theoretical guidance is becoming all the more acknowledged as an indispensable element in translation practice.Under the guidance of Peter Newmark's translation theory, this paper sets out to analyze the translation of popular literature. Newmark divides all texts in two 6 categories, with focus on three of them, namely, expressive function text, informative function text and vocative function text. On the basis of the categorization, Newmark puts forward the dual of semantic translation and communicative translation, which are meant for different kinds of texts. A correlative approach to translation, formulated by Newmark in 90s, further complemented his theoretical system. The approach requires translators to choose different techniques such as transformation, naturalization, literal translation and paraphrasing in accordance with the importance of the language of the original text. Nightingale by American author Kristin Hannah, is chosen as the material for translation analysis. According to Peter Newmark's theory, translation of popular literary works cannot completely follow an approach of semantic translation or that of communicative translation. Instead, a combination of the two should be adopted because different parts of the novel exhibit a varying degrees of literal importance. The version should be close to the original text as requested by Newmark's Correlative Approach to Translation. This paper also demonstrates the application of translation theories as well as some translation techniques by examples extracted from the text. This paper advocates the thought of applying Newmark's theory about semantic translation and communicative translation into not only the literary work as a whole, but also to the analysis of different parts and of elements of the work. This paper illustrates specific methods and criteria of popular novel translation with examples in aspects of format, clause, rhetorical device, changing part of speech, notation and punctuation. The idea of this analysis is to grasp the original text at both macroscopic and microscopic scale, and to reproduce the work in the target language with style and details that are close to the original text.