Analysis of the Chinese Translation of The Art of Loving (Excerpt) from the Perspective of Newmark’s Translation Theory

Abstract

Peter Newmark was a famous British translator and translation theorist. According to the type of text, he divided texts into expressive text, informative text, and vocative text in his first book Approaches to Translation, published in 1981 and formed the core concept of his translation thought, “semantic translation” and “communicative translation”. Based on semantic translation, communicative translation, and text typology, this paper tries to analyze the Chinese translation of the source text, The Art Of Loving(excerpts), written by Eric Fromm, a famous German-American psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher. Due to the psychology and critical thinking of the source text, the translator prefers to communicative translation and uses various translation methods and skills to reduce reading difficulties. This paper finds that any translation is a mixture of many theories, strategies, or methods. To some extent, in the process of translation, it inspires us to pay more attention to the use of translation theory, so that intuition and rationality can be combined, and closer to the essence of translation than the subconscious translation behaviors.