A Report On The Translation Of The Chapter 16 To Chapter 19 Of The Mistress Of Nothing

The translation report discusses the translation of The Mistress of Nothing (2009), a novel written by Canadian writer Kate Pullinger and told in the first person with plain language.With compelling story, this novel won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in 2009, and there is no Chinese version by now, thus it is worthy to translate it. The source text of the translation is selected from chapter sixteen to chapter nineteen, which mainly tells the miserable experience of the mistress in Egypt after being driven out of her lady’s house for her betrayal.In this report, the author combines the theory " Faithfulness, Expressiveness, Elegance" with specific examples and analyzes how the author handles the important and difficult points in the translation through adopting all kinds of methods in the process of translating the novel The Mistress of Nothing from Chapter sixteen to Chapter nineteen. The main content of this report are of five parts:introduction, task process, theoretical basis, case studies and conclusion. In the former part of this report, the author introduces the background, the significance, the author and the main content of the original text of this translation practice, analyzes the general features of novel, the specific features of the source text and the work after this translation practice, introduces the theoretical basis of this translation practice, namely Yan Fu’s theory " Faithfulness, Expressiveness, Elegance". And then, the author combines this theory with specific translation instances and analyzes how the author adopts some translation skills to handle the important and difficult points in the process of this translation practice. In " Faithfulness", the author mainly analyzes the use of certain methods to understand the meaning of specific words and to represent the style of the original text. In " Expressiveness", the author analyzes some skills in translating sentences, the skills including shifting, punctuation, division and combination. In " Elegance", the author analyzes the methods of reproducing the aesthetic value of the original text from the transmission of images and scenes. Through this practice, the author becomes more adept in applying some translation skills, acquires some new matters that need attention in translation, and understands the truth that to become a great translator, one needs long-time practice. Meanwhile, the author has been aware of the shortcomings in this translation practice and has determined to strive to make improvement in the future study.