A Comparative Study On Two Chinese Versions Of Of Mice And Men From The Perspective Of Newmark’s Translation Theory

Since the reform and opening up of the last century,cultural exchanges and collisions at home and abroad continue to deepen,the translation theory researches of various foreign schools that emerged in the 1950 s has been gradually introduced to China.The famous Peter Newmark’s translation theory quickly gained the attention of domestic translators.Today,many translation critics still use Newmark’s translation theories to guide translation practice.Of Mice and Men was published in 1937 and its author John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature for this work.This novel is one of the ten must-read classics in American middle schools.It truly reproduces the tragic life of low-classes in the western of the country in 1930 s.The novel has been translated into more than 200 languages,and there have been more than ten Chinese versions.Scholars have thoroughly discussed the text itself from different angles,but there are only a handful of studies on its translations.In view of this,this paper will use the classic translation theory to conduct a comparative study of the two chosen Chinese versions.First of all,based on semantic translation and communicative translation theory,the two versions are compared and analyzed at the lexical,sentence and discourse levels respectively.At the lexical level,it analyzes the book title,person names,places name translation,and expression of idioms in the novel;at the sentence level,it pays attention to the translation of simile and attributive clauses;at the text level,it focuses on the description of the environment and the description of the characters in the novel.Secondly,guided by Newmark’s translation criticism theory,the analysis based on the functional criticism method is to have a research between the original text and the two versions from creative purposes,text types and language characteristics.Based on the functional criticism,linguistic mistakes and creative translations will be discussed.Through comparative research based on semantic translation and communicative translation theory,Li directly uses standardized personal names and place names while Qin is more inclined to the combination of communicative translation and transliteration.For idiom translation,Qin retains the characteristics of the original text,and then uses annotations to facilitate readers’ understanding of the original text but Li prefers communicative translation,translating the connotation of the source language directly.As for attributive clauses and simile sentences,Li translation is flexible and changeable,not constrained by the original text,and prefers to communicative translation;Qin is accustomed to retaining the sentence structure of the original text,so he uses semantic translation in most cases.When translating discourses or long difficult sentences,the two use semantic and communicative translation flexibly.On the basis of functional criticism,the author finds that Qin Si’s translation basically retains the content and form of the source language,and the words used are more characteristic of the times;Li Tianqi’s translation is not restricted by the form of the original text,and the translation is more natural and smooth.Through the analysis of analytical criticism,three suggestions to avoid mistranslations are summarized.In creative translation,it is important for translators to understand the context and linguistic differences between source language and target language.Translation works are also affected by many other reasons such as the background and translator’s language style.Therefore,in the actual translation process,A good translator should have a good command of the balance between semantic translation and communicative translation.