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In practice, what troubles a translator most is the paradox of translating: function and meaning, language and culture, etc. Facing all these problems, one must find the balance and constantly alter his choices. He has to obtain organized insights from experience, “no problem—no translation theory!”（Newmark, 1988: 9）
Translation theory is concerned with the following aspects in accordance with Peter Newmark（1982: 19）：
1）The main concern of translation theory is to determine appropriate translation methods for the widest possible range of texts or text-categories.
2）It provides a framework of principles, restricted rules and hints for translating text and criticizing translations, a background for problem-solving.
3）It is concerned with choices and decisions.
4）It attempts to give some insights into the relation between thought, meaning and language; the universal, cultural and individual aspects of language and behaviour, the understanding of culture; the interpretation of texts that may be clarified and even supplemented by way of translation.
Translation theories are so diverse that the existing paradox is the lack of a fully acceptable one accounting for all the complex phenomena in translating. In other words, there is no generally accepted translation theory. However, it is useful to group together variously related theories according to their characteristics. It is generally agreed that there are four approaches, namely philological, linguistic, communicative and sociosemiotic approaches, which have contributed greatly to translation theories.
The philological theory focuses primarily on the nature of the literary text to be translated. It pays much attention to the result of translation, to the comparison of thematic structures, stylistic features and artistic effects of source language（SL）and target language（TL）texts.
The basic issue in the theory is either to bring the message to the readers or to bring the readers to the message. As Schleiermacher put it “the translator can either leave the writer in peace as much as possible and bring the reader to him, or he can leave the reader in peace as much as possible and bring the writer to him”.
It has been an argument for the translators for a long time whether the sense should be rendered at the expense of the words and grammar, or the meaning of a phrase should be sacrificed in order to conserve the form of the original text, like the issues of literal and free translating. The history consists of an alternation between literalism and unrestricted freedom. There seems to be no compromise of the two. “Only rarely do translators aim at a kind of‘golden mean’ between opposite extremes. Though they may argue about the importance of a middle course, most translators either show decided preference for the source language text or they give priority to receptor's interest in naturalness.”（Jin Di, 1984: 16）In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a tendency in many circles to revert to more literal types of translating. For the preservation of the form of a classical text, there were communicative losses in translation. For this reason, some philologists maintained the position that translation is essentially impossible. In the twentieth century, it is believed by many that a text can be separated from its context. In this sense, every literary text has a life of its own and its interpretation need not be related to the setting out of which it arises. This orientation has resulted in some extreme views about translating, leading many translators astray. The philological theory has a glorious history and is still favoured by some translators.
The linguistic theory focuses upon a comparison of the broader structures of SL and TL texts, adopting certain language theory as its basis. It shows special interest in the correspondence of grammatical categories and that of lexical categories of SL and TL. As for grammatical categories, one must make clear how the two languages express relationships of voice, tense, aspect, number, etc. But instead of treating these as isolated categories, an attempt is made to analyze them in terms of integrated structures. Correspondence of lexical categories for the two languages is the basic issue in this approach, which includes synonymy, polysemy, pun, vagueness, etc. The most extensive treatment of the linguistic theory has been made by J. C. Catford, who has fruitfully categorized translation shifts between levels, structures, word classes, units（“rank-shifts”）and systems, distinguishing between“context”（ of situation）and“co-text”（of language）（Newmark, 1982: 9）. Outstanding in this approach are Vinay and Darbelnet, who enumerate seven procedures—transliteration, loan translation, literal translation, transposition, modulation, equivalence and adaptation（ibid: 10）. What is important in this approach is the focus upon the functions of language rather than formal features. One should determine the function of language constructions in terms of new information and old information, the issue of emphasis and focus, which can be both insightful and practically helpful.
The linguistic theory has made contributions to the study of translation, but its shortness is also quite obvious. It just observes and compares the linguistic forms and works out of a series of corresponding rules for shifts. In actual translating, there is no rule which is invariable and fit for all the cases. In fact, it is difficult to find any set pattern in translation. Furthermore, a strict linguistic approach frequently overlooks the communicative aspect of discourse.
Translating means communicating. Communication theory is an enlarged theory of information that has helped translators see the importance of all the factors in interlingual communication: source, target, transmission, noise（physical and psychological），setting and feedback（immediate and anticipatory）（Nida, 1993: 163）.
A great deal of attention is paid to impact and redundancy in translation. This theory attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained from the readers of the original. In this approach, the focus is on the extent to which the meaning of the source text is transmitted to receptors in a form that they can understand and appreciate.
Eugene Nida said:
“The communication of meaning across cultures always requires certain adjustments in the form of the message if the content is to be accurately and faithfully transmitted, for strictly word-for-word renderings inevitably tend to distort the meaning of the source-language message. Communicative translation addresses itself solely to the second reader, who does not anticipate difficulties or obsscurites, and would expect a generous transfer of foreign elements into his own culture as well as his language where necessary. But even here the translator still has to respect and work on the form of the source language text as the only material basis for his work.”（ibid: 39）
Generally, a communicative translation is likely to be smoother, simpler, clearer, more direct, more conventional. It conforms to a particular register of language and tends to undertranslate. For example, it uses more generic, hold-all terms in difficult passages. Meaning is complicated, multi-levelled, a network of relations as devious as the channels of thought in the brain. The more communication, the more generalization; the more simplification, the less meaning.
To a certain extent, the communication theory lacks adequate breadth. It has not provided a sufficient basis for understanding the nature of linguistic signs on all levels of discourse, nor has it provided adequate insight into the relationship of language and culture.
Sociosemiotic approach has taken its insight from semiotics. It attempts to identify meaning and function of certain signs in a given social situation, finding correspondence in another culture through the processes of decoding and encoding, basing itself on the concept of“language as social semiotic”.
Halliday（1988: 1）observes:
“The formulation‘language as social semiotic’ says very little by itself; it could mean almost anything, or nothing at all. It belongs to a particular conceptual framework, and is intended to suggest a particular interpretation of language within that framework.”“It means interpreting language within a sociocultural context, in which the culture itself is interpreted in semiotic terms—as an information system, if that terminology is preferred.”
This approach makes full use of the information system in translating, putting all signs（verbal or nonverbal）in the frame of a social context, analyzing scientifically their meanings and functions at different angles or levels:
semantic angle — referential meaning, pragmatic meaning, and linguistic meaning;
functional angle — ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function;
situational angle — field, tenor and mode; register, code, etc.
Advantages:
1） Inclusiveness
It takes into consideration various aspects of the philological, linguistic, communication theories of translation, expanding considerably the basis for recognizing the meaningfulness（or significance）of both lexical content and rhetorical form.
Nida（1993: 164）explains: “the great advantage of semiotics over other approaches to interlingual communications is that it deals with all types of signs and codes and especially with language as the most comprehensive and complex of all the systems of signs which humans employ. No holistic approach to translating can exclude semiotics as a fundamental discipline in encoding and decoding signs.”
2） Equal attention to referential and pragmatic meanings
Another distinct advantage of this approach is the requirement that equal attention be given to referential and pragmatic meanings, because understanding of signs involves the total communication of an event within the social context and is relevant to all the other signs which combine verbal symbols.
3） Culture
The approach, endowed with a power to describe translating phenomena, may widen the scope of translation studies. It goes out of the range of pure linguistic research into cultural comparison in translation theory. Paralinguistics and extralinguistics may find their proper positions in the theory.
04） Angle
This approach enables us to view some unsettled controversy at a different angle, such as over literal and liberal translation. It takes language units or discourse segments as the object of translating operation, neglecting to what extent the socio-cultural information carried in the message should be conveyed on certain occasion. It emphasizes the fact that each sign of a message carries a meaning.