A Report On The Translation Of The Friend(Excerpts)

This report is based on the translation practice of The Friend written by Sigrid Nunez,which won the 2018 National Book Award and a New York Times Bestseller.The Friend narrates a writer whose mentor and lifelong friend and lover suddenly commits suicide,takes care of his giant Great Dane and gets conform from it.It concentrates on not only the contemplation on friendship,loss,and bereavement but also the celebration of the wonder and healing power of the human-canine bond.In the form of trivial letters,The Friend explores the serious themes of friendship,death,and literature in an intimate and confessional tone,and is full of deep meditation on friendship,love,and death,which challenges traditional thinking and forms.The translation aims to convey the author’s complex and profound emotion to the target readers in an appropriate and natural way,arousing their emotional resonance and deep reflection on the above topics.The register theory is proposed by the systemic functional linguist,M.A.K.Halliday in1978.The term “register” refers to the functional variety of language,which can be interpreted as a linguistic variant changes with that of the context of situation.It contains three variables,namely,field,tenor,and mode.Field refers to what is happening,which covers the topics,the environment that language takes place,and the activity that participants take part in.Tenor means the participants in communication,including their role relationships and the identity as well as attitude of the speaker.Mode refers to the communicative channels or communicative media,including written language,spoken language,and rhetorical devices.Halliday puts forward that the three variables of the register,namely,the field,tenor,and mode,affect the use of language in any situational context(register).According to register theory,in the process of translation,the translator should correctly grasp the features of registers in the source text,and properly represent the characteristics of field,tenor,and mode that the original text relies on,so as to achieve the register equivalence between the source text and target target.The Friend is featured with epistolary form to reflect the character relationships.The narrator attempts to relieve the grief by writing down the memories with her friend who commits suicide.Concise and elegiac,a large number of character dialogues are used to reproduce the scene,and diverse descriptive discourses are skillfully described in the first person.In addition,the translation of culture-loaded words,long and complex sentences,emotional expression,speaking tone,and communicative modes is the difficulty that the translator encounters in this translation practice.Therefore,the translator selects the register theory as the guiding theory of this translation report,and illustrates how the translator adopts register analysis from the aspects of field,tenor,and mode to convey the original meaning and linguistic style of the source text,so as to reproduce the themes and scenes of The Friend.This report is divided into five chapters.Chapter One illustrates the translation description.Chapter Two explains the translation process and the difficulties and solutions in the translation process.Chapter Three is the theoretical basis that reviews the notion of the register theory,the three variables of register theory,and the application of register theory in literary translation.Chapter Four is case analysis,in which the translator analyzes the first two parts of The Friend in detail under the guidance of the register theory.The last chapter draws the conclusion that mainly summarizes the whole report,and discusses the gains and limitations of this translation practice.