A Report On The E-C Translation Of Pedagogical Works From The Perspective Of Newmark's Communicative Translation Theory

Western pedagogical books have exerted a profound influence on the modern education system in China.From the establishment of the disciplinary system in the late Qing dynasty to the construction and development of the university system today,it is closely related to the translation of western pedagogical books into China.However,although a large number of western pedagogical books have been introduced into China,the research on the translation of this kind of book was still in its infancy.The reason behind it may be that there are so many different text types of pedagogical books,including informative text,expressive text as well as vocative text,so that it is difficult for scholars to find a unified approach for translating such a wide range of text types.Besides,the content of pedagogical books is also a major contributing factor to this problem.Pedagogical books' content is not only limited to the field of pedagogy but also involves the cultural,political and historical background of the source language.Therefore,there is a paucity of research existing to inform the unified translation methodology in translating western pedagogical books.In order to make a convincing analysis,this paper will only focus on one text type of the pedagogical books,the vocative type,and take Dr.Jenna Mittelmeier's Small Teaching as the research object to carry on a case study.After reading and translating the whole book,the author of this paper has found that this book tended to convey its main ideas by communicating with readers rather than preaching.Given this writing feature,the author of this paper decided to adopt Newmark's communicative translation theory as the guiding theory to conduct this case study,because Newmark's communicative translation theory also required that the translation should centre on target language readers and make sure the translation can be understood by target language readers without any difficulty.The whole process of translation followed three principles of Newmark's communicative translation theory: meeting the reading needs of the target language readers,conforming to the linguistic norms in the target language and generating effective communication between the source text and the target language readers.In order to better translate the original text,the author of this paper decided to first understand the culture of the source language andthen explained the specific cultural elements in the annotation to achieve the purpose of effective cultural communication between the source text and target language readers.Then,in order to make the translation smooth and easy to read,the author also learned the lexical and grammatical rules in both Chinese and English to better convert the original sentence structure into a sentence structure conforming to the Chinese language norms.Besides,the author also adopted the method of amplification to further interpret the content in the source text.In this way,the target language readers can extract useful information in the source text according to their own reading needs.Through the analysis of this translation practice report,the author of this paper believes that Newmark's communicative translation theory can play an effective guiding role in the translation of western vocative pedagogical books,because it can not only guarantee the quality of the translation but also make the translation natural and smooth.It is hoped that this translation practice report can provide a reference for relevant translation practices in the future.