A Report On The E-C Translation Of National Geographic (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Newmark’s Translation Theories

This report took two popular science articles on marine animals and plants“secrets of the whales” and “rescuing reefs” in National Geographic as the source texts,and discussed how to translate such dominantly informative English texts supplemented with vocative functions into Chinese based on Peter Newmark’s text type theory and translation theory.Marine animal and plant resources are vital to the world ’s sustainable socio-economic development.Countries around the world advocate the rational development and utilization of marine resources and promote the governance of marine ecological environment.At the same time,many countries work closely together to launch various measures to protect the orderly development of marine resources,enhance the availability of marine resources,and strive to restore the marine environment.The source texts were published in May 2021.So far,there have been no translations online or offline for reference.Given the valuable information for protecting whales and saving coral reefs,they are worth translating.National Geographic is a dominantly informative text dotted with some vocative utterances.O n the one hand,because the source text contains more objective facts and case data,it is mainly informative.According to Newmark’s text type theory,so communicative translation strategy should be adopted.On the other hand,it contains some subjective analysis and thinking of the author,with the aim to arouse people ’s awareness of the protection of marine ecological environment.This part is classified as vocative and its translatio n should be guided by the semantic translation strategy.Communicative translation attempts to produce on its target readers a receptive effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original.Semantic translation attempts to render,as long as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow,the exact contextual meaning of the original.Communicative translation requires faithfulness to the original text in content,so domestication might be chosen to cater to the sentence patterns,while semantic translation requires faithfulness to the original text in both content and form,with direct translation as the main translation method.English informative texts often use long and difficult sentences,for which the communicative translation strategy is suitable.However,English vocative texts occasionally use long difficult sentences as well,so the semantic translation strategy may not necessarily apply.In other words,the use of semantic translation and communicative translation strategies can not only be determined by the text type,but also the specific language structure.This report suggested the communicative translation strategy as the main strategy,and the semantic translation strategy as the supplementation,so as to maximize the flexibility of translation practice,making the translation both faithful in objective content and smooth in form,in the hope that the Chinese readers can receive almost the same receptive effects as the English readers.