Areport On The E-C Translation Of Character Description In Maritime Novel The Pirate

Regarded as the soul of a novel,the character description is key to a successful novel creation.For translators,how to translate the character description is one of their major tasks.Their success in such a translation will be helpful for the reproduction of characters.Thus,it is worth studying how to deal with the translation of character description under the guidance of appropriate translation theory.Taking the E-C translation of The Pirate,written by British novelist Marryat Frederick,as an example,and under the guidance of Peter Newmark's semantic and communicative translation theory,this thesis makes an analysis of the character description translation,aiming to provide some suggestions for the character description translation in the future.The semantic and communicative theory is the most important and special part of Peter Newmark's theory.Semantic translation tries to render the contextual meaning of the original text,giving priority to the information of the original text.Communicative translation attempts to produce on the readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original,attaching importance to the effects.In The Pirate,there are a lot of character descriptions,including mental description,portrait description,speech presentation,and action description.In order to depict the the characters vividly and impressively,the novelist employs many literary techniques,some of which are the employment of repetition in the mental description,simile and hyperbole in portrait description,slang and imperative sentences in speechdescription and serial verb sentences in action description.According to the features of character description in The Pirate,this thesis puts forward some translation methods,such as keeping the original sentence pattern to reproduce the original writing style,paraphrasing the rhetoric devices properly to keep the rhetoric devices of the original text,adding authentic words to portray the character's personality as well as restructuring the sentence to reorganize the syntactic structure.This thesis finds out that the semantic translation can show the original text's connotations,so it can be used to guide the translation of character description with plain language,which is mostly applicable to the translation of mental and portrait description;communicative translation theory focuses on the effects of translation,so it can guide the translation of character description with linguistic differences or special meaning,which is mostly used in the translation of speech and action description.Sometimes in order to achieve a better effect of translation,the semantic and communicative translation can be adopted at the same time.