A Chinese Translation Report On Environmental News Commentaries In The New Yorker Based On Newmark’s Text Typology

In recent years,human activities lead to global warming,ecological environment deterioration and species extinction.In the face of adverse environmental changes,environmental protection is urgent.Therefore,countries and individuals are duty-bound.In the news commentaries of The New Yorker,the sarcastic comments on environmental issues and policies are thought-provoking,and the views can be used as reference for China’s environmental protection efforts.However,The New Yorker has not published the Chinese version,and Chinese readers have some difficulties in reading them.Therefore,this translation report selects ten environmental news commentary texts from 2017 to 2020 in the The New Yorker website as the source texts.Based on Newmark’s text typology,the source texts belong to a compound text type,which combines the informative text,expressive text and vocative text,with informative text as the main text type.Based on this,communicative translation was adopted as the main translation method and semantic translation as the auxiliary translation method.In view of the expressive texts that reflecting the authors’ personal writing style,semantic translation was adopted by literally translating the sentences with aesthetic characteristics and rhetorical devices such as simile and parallelism.The cohesive words were also retained.On the other hand,communicative translation was applied for informative text and vocative text.To be specific,at lexical level,some techniques were adopted,such as annotation and conversion,so that readers can read and understand the source texts better.At sentence level,addition,omission and conversion were used to make the target texts smoother and more fluent.At textual level,the translator appropriately added cohesion words and used omission to make the translation more cohesive.At rhetorical level,the translator used the translation technique of conversion.In this translation project,the translator has got the following experience.As for environmental news commentaries,the text types can be classified according to the genre and language characteristics of the source text under the guidance of Newmark’s text typology.Then,corresponding translation methods and appropriate translation techniques can be adopted.The translator hopes that this report can provide reference for Chinese translation of environmental news commentary texts.