A Study Of The Translation Of The Economic Forum Speeches From Chinese Into English—In Light Of Newmark's Text Type Classification And Translation Methods

With the globalization and regional integration developing at a great speed,various economic cooperation organizations and forums have emerged.In recent years,China plays an increasingly important role in these organizations and forums and Chinese leaders regularly deliver speeches concerning China's economic status,policies etc.at gathering moments of economic meetings to make friends around the world know more about China and,especially,the Chinese economy.As we know,a successful delivery of the Chinese voice not only counts on leaders' nice presentation skills,it also depends on the excellent efforts translators or interpreters make.Therefore,this paper tries to make an evaluation on the current translation quality of economic forum speeches in light of Newmark's text classification and translation methods theory.First,speeches are assigned to three types of texts,namely expressive,informative and vocative texts according the main function that they perform.Then some representative samples are chosen and their corresponding translations are appraised in light of semantic or communicative translation method,as Newmark requires.Through analysis and discussion the author finds out that the theory is feasible and of necessity.To be specific,translators are better at using communicative translation method and they do a better job in the translation of informative and vocative texts,serving the purpose of “producing an effect on its readers as closely as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original”.However,due to the lack of the awareness of the text function or to the limitation of the translators' competence,translators do not often do a good job when it comes to the rendering of the expressive texts.At the lexical level,some four-character phrases and cultural terms are not reproduced in the target language and,syntactically,long sentences are often split thus losing the syntactic and stylistic feature of the original.