| As the greatest writer of the Victorian age,Charles Dickens ranks second only to Shakespeare in English literature.He impresses people with his roles in multiple fields:actor,reporter,best-selling author,legal historians,editor in chief,reciter,philanthropist,etc.His literary works have a profound influence in the world.What is more,he wrote a great number of letters.As an important means of human communication,letters are also an essential literary genre.Many writers have a passion for writing letters and are good at expressing their personal feelings and opinions in them.Personal correspondence is like a key to open the writer's heart,helping readers to explore and understand the writer's inner world,making it an important source for knowing and studying the writer.Therefore,The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens was chosen as the material of my English-Chinese(E-C for short)translation practice.In his book Approaches to Translation,the well-known British translator and translation theorist Peter Newmark classifies texts into three types: expressive,informative and vocative.He proposes two translation methods: semantic and communicative translation.Meanwhile,he proposes that “few texts are purely expressive,informative or vocative: most include all three functions,with and emphasis on one of the three.”(Newmark,1988,p.42)and that “all translation must be in some degree both communicative and semantic,social and individual.It is a matter of difference of emphasis.”(Newmark,2001,p.62)This report,based on the author's translation of The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens under the guidance of Peter Newmark's semantic and communicative translation theory,studies the E-C translation of personal correspondence in terms of words,sentences,and rhetorical devices to show how to use the semantic and communicative translationtheory to retain in translation the writing style of the original text and make the translation work acceptable for target language readers. |
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