A Practice Report On The Translation Of Why Simplify?

In recent years,children’s literature at home and abroad made all its way to a prosperous market,which gives the children’s literature translation theorists more enthusiasm for thinking.Why Simplify? is specially written for busy teenagers who may not have the time or the patience to plough through a thick book,whose author--Teo Aik Cher,serves as multi-roles.He is not only an educator,an illustrator,an editor,but also the writer of several popular children’s books.This book aims to guide teenagers to a simple and purposeful life,which would be the same helpful to our Chinese young readers.In this practice report on the translation of Why simplify? The author introduced the translation project and procedures.Before the translation,some preparation work needed to be done,such as getting some information about the background materials related to this book,some basic typesetting skills and the general features of children’s literature: edutainment,figurativeness,interestingness and storytelling.On the basis of it,the predefined styles of the target text should be clarified.And then comprehensive reading should be done.After the translation procedure,proofreading and correction were necessary.In the main body,the author focused on a large number of cases to illustrate how the predefined styles of the target text to be fulfilled,how the features of children’s literature to be displayed and how the purpose of the translation project to be achieved,concerning the following different levels: lexical level and syntactic level,including the application of Chinese reduplications,application of onomatopoetic words,application of Chinese modal particles,application of high-frequency words,application of Chinese R-ending retroflexion;application of short sentences,application of metaphorical sentences,application of Chinese idioms,application of active voice.In the light of specialties of the target language—Chinese,Skopos Theory was applied intentionally or unintentionally into the whole translation procedures,to help make the target language smoother,to suit the Chinese young readers’ reading habits more,and to help them better understand the book.Although the translation text was accepted by the client successfully,there were still a lot of limitations existing.Some ingenious parts in the source text like puns or harmonic sounds were not translated into Chinese perfectly and no computer assisted translation software was used during the whole translation project.In future,the translator needs to enrich the knowledge of her bilingual languages constantly in hope to do better in future projects and it is hoped that the translation of this book can serve as useful purpose in children’s literature translation in the future.