A Contrastive Study of Qi Ahong’s and Xia Yang’s Chinese Versions of And Then There Were None

In this thesis, two Chinese versions of And Then There Were None- a representative of detective novels, are selected for research. It aims to contrast and analyse Qi Ahong's and Xia Yang's Chinese versions from the perspective of semantic translation and communicative translation, and study their translation methods and skills of detective novel. This thesis uses contrastive analysis method and bibliographic method to analyse these two versions from the perspective of semantic translation and communicative translation. The results indicate that Xia Yang's version tends to communicative translation, while Qi Ahong's version tends to semantic translation too much, and sometimes even ignoring communicative function. However, in the practice of detective novel translation, both of these two translation methods should be utilized, and translators should choose the most suitable translation method according to different contexts. This paper provides a new perspective for the contrastive analysis of the Chinese versions of And Then There Were None, and puts forward a reference for the translation of detective novels. Moreover, the proposed translation method combining semantic translation and communicative translation helps to promote the improvement of Chinese versions of detective novels and contributes to boost the communication and transmission of world culture.