A Study On The English Translation Of Chinese University Web Pages From The Perspective Of Newmark's Text Type Theory

As the main channel for foreign students and foreign scholars to learn about the abundant teaching resources and enrollment criterion of a university,the official English introduction text in its website plays an extremely important role in the publicity of the relevant information.A well translated English introduction text of a university in its official website,to some extent,is representing a bright image of its own to the readers.However,through a careful comparative analysis on a collection of Chinese introduction texts and their relevant English translations of some universities on their official websites,this paper found that there are still some deficiencies in the English translations of many universities' Chinese introduction texts concerning both the culture and the text type,etc,making it difficult to draw student readers' attentions.To solve these problems,this paper attempts to make an appropriate study on translating the universities' Chinese web page introduction texts under the guidance of Peter Newmark's text typology theory.As one of the most leading translation theories in translation history,the text typology of Newmark keeps a strong guiding role in translation practices.According to Newmark's text typology theory,the source texts in a translation can be mainly sorted into three types,which are expressive texts,informative texts and vocative texts.Under the guidance of the text-dividing principles of this theory,this thesis,through methods of documentation,induction and qualitative analysis,had made a careful analysis on 32 universities' Chinese introduction texts cited from their official websites which involve the textual style,stylistic features,textual functions and target readership of the texts.The findings are as follows: The discourse style of the Chinese introduction texts of the universities is of descriptive nature,and the writing style is relatively formal.In addition,the textual functions of the universities' Chinese introduction texts include the expressive function,the informative function and the vocative function,among which the informative function takes an absolutely dominant role in any university's Chinese introduction text,therefore,the web-page Chinese introduction texts of the universities are the informative text,with theinformative function is as the main textual function,the expressive function and appellative function,as the supplementary functions.In order to explain more objectively the text function of the university introduction texts,Halliday's Transitivity theory is to be applied to analyze the texts.The analysis results show that material process,relational process and existential process are three main processes in the transitivity of the Chinese web page introduction texts.From the perspective of Newmark's text typology theory,Semantic Translation strategy is fit for guiding translating expressive texts while Communicative Translation Strategy is fit for translating both informative texts and appellative texts.Therefore,it can not be more appropriate for the translator to mainly adopt the Communicative Translation strategy during the process of translating Chinese universities' web page introduction texts into English ones.Communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original.Under the guidance of the Communicative Translation strategy,this paper had made some translation practices on some universities' introduction texts,and the specific translation methods during the translating procedure had been discussed.They are "omission","annotation","reorganization" and “literal translation”,etc.It is expected that this thesis will have implications for translating Chinese university web-page introduction texts into English in the future.