A Translation Report For Marilynne Robinson’s Lila(Excerpts)

This study is a translation report on the excerpts from Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, a novel published in October, 2014. The part of the novel from page 24 to 70 is chosen as the translation text(about 16600 English words). The excerpts chosen here belong to the first part of the book and mainly talk about Lila’s roaming in her younger times, Lila and Ames’ getting to know each other in Gilead, and Lila’s struggle in her life and psychology. They involve the heroine’s roaming, loneliness, religion, etc. The linguistic characteristics of Lila are mainly its frequent use of pronouns and shifted tenses, which make the story difficult to understand and need to be thought over. Although simple, plain words and short sentences are used in most expressions of the novel, the sentence structures are strange, resulting in its obscurity. In addition, this novel is kind of stream of consciousness and has series of the heroine—Lila’s psychological descriptions,which needs the translator to exactly master and express the meanings and feelings of the original text.There are four chapters in the report: Chapter One, task description, mainly including the introduction of the writer Marilynne Robinson, the work Lila and requirements; Chapter Two,process description, which deals with the translation steps, like preparation, while-translating and proofreading; Chapter Three, case study, which analyzes the translation strategies and skills during the translation process; Chapter Four, conclusion, including the translator’s experiences and limitations.