A Translation Report On The Tea Girl Of Hummingbird Lane Under The Guidance Of Newmark’s Translation Strategy

In recent years,the study of Chinese American literature has drawn more attention from the public.This report chose The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane as the source text.It is a novel written by Lisa See,a Chinese American author,who was listed as#1 New York Times bestselling author in 1997.This novel was published in 2017,and no Chinese version has been published yet.Due to the differences of cultural background and linguistic peculiarities,the expression patterns of Chinese and English can be quite diverse.The translator met some difficulties while translating this novel,such as translation of impersonal subjects,culture-loaded words,ambiguous sentences,and lack of information of the Akha’s religion is another obstacle in translation.This report aims to analyze the contextual meaning of the original text and find the best approach to render different features of the source text.Peter Newmark proposed semantic translation and communicative translation.Semantic translation strategy is used to translate the exact contextual meaning and retain the flavor of the source text,but it may also lead to the loss of meaning.Communicative translation strategy is used to reproduce the same effect of the source text,in spite of loss of semantic content.When it comes to literature translation,semantic translation strategy and communicative translation strategy can complement each other in the translation process.Hence this translation report adopts both semantic translation strategy and communicative translation strategy to guide the translation task.This report consists of five chapters.The first chapter introduces the author and source text,background of Chinese American literature,objectives and significance of the translation task.The second chapter includes information collection process,choice of translation strategy,pre-translation case analysis,translation and proofreading process.The third chapter presents Peter Newmark’s translation strategy,the differences between semantic translation and communicative translation,challenges in translation and applicability of Newmark’s translation strategy.The fourth chapter analyzes some examples under the guidance of semantic and communicative translation strategies.The fifth chapter summarizes gains and limitations of the report.Under the guidance of Newmark’s translation strategy,the translator made a detailed analysis on the translation of the first two chapters of the novel.It shows that semantic translation can effectively maintain the exotic feature and vivid expression of the source language,while communicative translation can improve the readability of the target text and address translation difficulties effectively.