A Report On The English To Chinese Translation Of I Heard The Owl Call My Name (Excerpt)

This is a report on the English to Chinese translation of the first part of I Heard the Owl Call My Name written by an American writer Margaret Craven.As one of Margret's representative works,I Heard the Owl Call My Name became a best seller in the United States in 1973.In this novel,the hero,Mark Brain,a white vicar,was sent to an Indian tribe because of his incurable disease.From then on,Mike lived with the Indian people.He tried to know more about them and also to respect their culture,winning himself the acceptance and trust of the Indian people.The part the translator translated is mainly about Mark's early life in the tribe,and how he switched his views towards life and death gradually.In this report,based on the feature of the source text,the author of the report analyzes some cases in lexical level,syntactic level and textual level under the guidance of the Functional Equivalence Theory.After making a detailed consideration,it can be concluded that under the theory,and from the perspective of the target-language readers,the translator should make full efforts to reproduce the content and style of the source text for the target-language readers.In addition,appropriate translation skills and strategies were flexibly used to make the translated text largely equivalent to the source text in order to ensure that target-language readers could understand and appreciate the translated text in a similar way as the original readers do.In the translation process,the translator encountered some difficulties,that was,how to properly deal with non-English expressions,long and complex sentences and rhetorical devices in the text so as to faithfully reappear the meaning and style of the source text.The translator consulted with relevant books and documents for settling these problems.In addition,translation skills and strategies,such as transliteration,free translation,addition,omission as well as restructuring were used to realize the large equivalence between the source text and translated text under the guidance of Functional Equivalence Theory.After the translation of the source text,the translator has learned a lot.The translator has known the Functional Equivalence Theory better,and has generally understood how to adopt the theory in the novel translation.In view of the fact that this material has not been translated,it is hoped that this translation task can provide a translated text for domestic readers.And they can gain a more particular knowledge of Indian mysterious culture.