A Report On C-E Translation Of Lin Huiyin's Collection (Vol.3): Architecture (Chapter 5)(Excerpt)

The source text of this translation report is an excerpt from Lin Huiyin's Collection(volume 3): Architecture,which is a collection of works written by Lin Huiyin,a famous Chinese female architect.The translator takes the fifth chapter of this book as the source text.The main content of the source text is the description of traditional Chinese architecture in Shanxi province and features of the architecture,and the introduction to the current problems in Chinese architecture,which is worth translating.The translator finished this report guided by the British translation theorist Newmark's Text Typology.According to Newmark,there are three kinds of texts: informative,expressive,and vocative.As a record on architecture,the source text bears the first two types,suitable for applying semantic translation and communicative translation,which help to maintain both the information in the source text and its writing style in the target text.Therefore,based on semantic translation method,the translator adopts conversion to translate verbs,addition,and omission to translate the normal four-character phrases.As for the syntactical level,addition is employed to translate non-subject sentences,and combination to translate run-on sentences.However,communicative translation encourages the translator subjectively to tackle translation of proper nouns and idioms.After the completion of the present translation report,the translator holds that semantic and communicative translations can guide the Chinese-English translation of informative plus expressive text-types.Both translation methods can guide the translator not only to take the target readers' reading habits into consideration,but also to preserve the language style of the source text.Furthermore,to translate this piece of high-quality architectural text,parallel texts and the expertise knowledge on architecture are of vital importance.