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1.2 Significance of the Research
First of all, almost all of the papers focus on Peter Newmark’s communicative translation and semantic translation, which are sublimated by Newmark himself later. But this paper will put emphasis on his newest theory-- correlative approach to translation. And combining the translated names of China’s higher education institutions, this theory will be added to more practice evidences, since it has not been completely proved in translation between Chinese and English. Secondly, a mini-corpus of Chinese and English names of part of China’s higher education institutions will be built up including the history of their transitions of some of them. Thirdly, some names of the China’s higher education institutions have not been translated “closely”. The existing conditions of translations are in chaotic. Some higher education institutions which have a very similar type have different words to show their type. Therefore, this thesis will pay much attention to whether the translations of the names of these chosen China’s higher education institutions conform to Peter Newmark’s theory-- correlative approach to translation, how could the translations of their names be suitable for their basic attributes and how to standardize the names of China’s higher education institutions. Finally, this paper will put forward several solving methods for translation errors of higher education institutions’ English names.
2 A Correlative Approach to Translation
2.1 Origin of Peter Newmark’s Correlative Approach to Translation
Peter Newmark (1981) proposed his translation theories--communicative translation and semantic translation in his book Approaches to Translation. The author states “Communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original. Semantic translation attempts to render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original (Peter Newmark, 1981: 39)”. “The focus of semantic translation is on semantic content of the source text, while the focus of communicative translation is on the comprehension and response of receptors (Guan Yue & Qin Guanyu, 2013: 133)”. Also in this book, he pides functions of texts into six parts, including the expressive function, informative function, vocative function, aesthetic function, phatic function and metalingual function according to contents and styles.
Figure 2.1 (Peter Newmark, 1981: 39)
These two theories indicate new approaches to translation, but also arouse controversy again in translation circles. From 1991, Peter Newmark has made a re-assessment towards his previous theories which might be a little bit simplifying translation problems and may cause under translation and over translation. According to Chen Kai and Zhang Jianhui (2008), in order to overcome these problems, a new concept-- correlative approach to translation--is put forward by Peter Newmark in 1994.
2.2 Three Text-Categories
Based on the three main functions of language—the expressive function, the informative (representation) function and the vocative (appeal) function (Peter Newmark, 1988: 39) proposed by Jakobson (a member of Prague School), Peter Newmark pides texts into three different types, namely expressive text, informative text and vocative text.