A Report On Translating The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of The Fourfold Translation Motion

The translation task of the report is excerpted from the documentary novel The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child,Her American Doctors,and the Collision of Two Cultures(hereafter referred to as “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”)written by Anne Fadiman in 1997.Since the novel The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down covers 19 chapters,the translator choose the part of Preface,Chapter 12 and 13 as the source text of the translation task.Preface can be considered as a guide to the reading of the novel.Chapter 12 mainly describes the experience of the Lee's exile and Chapter 13 mainly describes the relationships and conflicts between the Lee's parents and medical workers in hospital.The two chapters are selected for the reason that Chapter 12 shows the hardship of the Lee family's experience,and Chapter 13 demonstrates the cultural miscommunication and conflict between the Lee family and the staffs in the hospital.To guarantee the quality of translation,the translator adopts a variety of strategies to meet the translation requirements,such as literal translation,free translation,communicative translation and domesticating translation.This translation takes George Steiner's hermeneutic theory as the main guiding principle.As the original text is a documentary novel,the translator also tries to ensure the faithfulness of the translation in the process of translation,so as to restore the facts as much as possible and convey the author's original writing intention.In the process of translation,the translator also consults other relevant materials,such as literature and historical documents,to ensure that the translation of place names and people's names is consistent with the current domesticating translation.Besides the first part of source text and translated text,the report consists of four sections.In Section one,the translator makes a brief introduction about the translation task including the background,reason and significance for selecting the source text.It also presents the writing style of the source text for choosing translation theories andstrategies in solving the translation problems.Section two presents the preparation for translation task,the discussion of translation theories and strategies,and the revision of the translation.Section three is about the case studies of translation in that it demonstrates the specific analysis of the problems that the translator has encountered in translation with the Fourfold Translation Motion.Finally,the fourth part summarizes the translation that needs to be improved and the translation lessons.