A Translation Report Of Shanghai Diary:A Young Girl’s Journey From Hitler’s Hate To War-torn China

This translation report is based on the translation practice of an excerpt from Shanghai Diary: A Young Girl’s Journey from Hitler’s Hate to Warn-torn China by the Jewish author Ursula Bacon.In the form of a diary and memoir,this book presents the life of the author and her Jewish family in Shanghai from April 1939 to August 1947.Ursula Bacon’s memoir,an invaluable record of Shanghai’s modern history,shows her respect for Chinese culture and records her friendship with Chinese people.The friendship between Chinese and Jewish people,which is full of humanity,is still little known.In view of this,the translation project uses it as the source text.The foreword,prologue and the first chapter of the book are used as the translation materials in this project.According to the text classification of Newmark,the source text has both the features of expressive text and vocative text.According to the characteristics of the text,the translation process is based on Li Changshuan’s CAE framework:comprehension,expression and adaptation.To be specific,the difficulties of comprehension mainly lie in vocabulary,phrases and idioms,which include polysemy,phrases,culture-loaded words,proper names(book,person,place)and idioms and technical terms.Therefore,their translation involves extensive search of reference the materials to identify the specific meaning of expressions in context.At the syntax level,a big difference between Chinese and English lies in the long sentence structure in English,which has to be separated into shorter ones in Chinese so as to convey the meaning of the source text faithfully.The difficulty of expression is mainly caused by the Europeanization of the translated text and the translator’s lack of literary accomplishment,which requires the repeated polishing of the translated text.The difficulty of adaptation mainly lies in the selection and supplement of the source text and the correction of its errors,which requires critical reading and thinking.The translation practice report can provide reference for the translation of autobiographical literary texts.