A Report On The Translation Of Biographical Literature Under The Guidance Of Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation

This is a translation practice report.The source texts of the translation practice is part of The Experience of Zimo,which is a biography about the experience of Zimo Zeng studying in America and working in an investment bank.In recent years,a large number of foreign biographies enter Chinese market,while Chinese biographies are rarely known to foreigners.Since translation plays an important role in the process of introducing Chinese literature to the outside world,translating biographical works and putting forward practical translation strategies are of great significance to the spread of Chinese culture.Based on Newmark’s theory of semantic translation and communicative translation,this report aims at analyzing the strategies used in translating biographical literature.There is a biggest difference between semantic translation and communicative translation.The former emphasizes the faithfulness to the source text,trying to maintain its forms and contents.While taking the target readers as the core,the latter one can make proper changes to reduce the difficulties in their reading.According to text features and based on the theory,the author puts forward some translation strategies from both the lexical and sentence level.At the lexical level,three strategies are put forward,namely,conversion,addition and omission as well as explanation.At the sentence level,the author also comes up with three approaches including restructuring,combination and division.This report focuses on the translation approaches of autobiographical texts.Through translation and case analysis,the author has the following understanding.First of all,the premise of translating autobiographical texts is to grasp personal characters and language styles.Only by doing that can we accurately show the characters to the readers.Secondly,the author believes that semantic translation and communicative translation is of importance for guiding the translation of the autobiographical text and can help translators analyze appropriate translation strategies.The author hopes that the analysis and summary in this report can be helpful for the translation of other autobiographies.