Report On The Chinese Translation Of The Lowland (Excerpt)

Novel is an important part of literary works,and novel translation plays a decisive role in promoting cultural communication among different languages.This time,the translator attempts to translate literary works—a novel,aiming at checking learning achievement gained over the past three years,improving translation ability and enhancing literature attainment in the process of translation,in order to lay a solid foundation for a qualified translator.The source text,about 10,000 English words,is an excerpt selected from the English novel The Lowland published in 2013,written by a famous Indian American woman writer,the youngest Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri.Culture shock,represented in this novel catches the translator’s attention.Meanwhile,complicated plot with quirky twists,accurate use of words and suitable structure of sentences,distinctive linguistic feature make the novel an excellent source text worth translating.Under the guidance of skopos theory,especially its three main rules(skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule),the translator translates the source text from English into Chinese by adopting several concrete translation techniques such as conversion translation,negation translation,restructuring translation,amplification translation,omission translation,embodiment translation.After several revises,the translator gets a qualified translated text.Then based on the skopos theory,the translator selects some typical examples from the source text to summarizes and analyze the translation techniques adopted in the process of translation from the perspectives of lexical,syntactic and rhetorical levels under the guidance of the supervisor.It is the hope of the translator that this translation practice can bring her a better understanding of literary translation,translation theory and translation technique and at the same time improve her ability to solve practical translation problems.