Strategies For Translating Biography From The Perspective Of Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation

Authenticity and literariness are the typical features of biography.Therefore,particular attention should be paid to both of them at the same time.And the translators should focus on accurate facts as well as on vivid descriptions in order to reproduce the original style and achieve ideal balance between them.Peter Newmark’s concepts of semantic translation and communicative translation are of great value in this regard.According to Newmark’s classification of text types and corresponding translation strategies,semantic translation should be faithful to the source language and culture so that the reader can appreciate the original meaning and language style applies to expressive texts,while communicative translation is a bit more deviant from the source language and culture,as its purpose is to make the translation easy to understand.Peter Newmark further points out that semantic translation is applicable to expressive texts and communicative translation is suitable to informative and vocative texts.As authenticity and literariness are prominent features of biography,the author of this paper argues that semantic and communicative translation should be employed in a comprehensive way.This paper is a project report based on the translation of Lean In : Women,Work,and the Will to Lead.With the selected samples,particularly words and phrases,sentence patterns and expressions of various kinds from the translation,the research results indicate that these two translation strategies can be combined in translation practice and provide guidance on how to make suitable choice in different contexts.This paper is divided into five parts.The first part is mainly the task description.The second part describes the translation process,which includes pre-translation,while-translation and post-translation.The third part is the literature review.The fourth part is the case study demonstrating how to apply semantic translation and communicative translation in real translation.The last part is the conclusion.