Report On The Translation Of Parenthesis In A Marvelous Life:The Amazing Story Of Stan Lee

The text of the report comes from the book A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee,which is a biography written by Danny Fingeroth.Stan Lee is the grand old man in America’s comic world who has created loads of popular comic characters.His stories are told by Danny in a unique manner.There are many parentheses in this text that have caused trouble to both the readers and translators.Moreover,since there is little study on the parenthesis of biographical texts,the author chooses the first three chapter of the text to discuss the translation of parenthesis.During the process,the author has studied the researches of former scholars,and made clear the definition,classification and functions of parenthesis.In this report,a parenthesis is defined as a word,clause,or sentence inserted as an explanation,aside,or afterthought into a passage with which it has not necessarily any grammatical connection,in writing usually marked off by brackets,commas,or dashes.And according to the function of parenthesis,the author divides it into four kinds: complementary parenthesis,emphasizing parenthesis,cohesive parenthesis and modifying parenthesis.Meanwhile,the author has analyzed the differences between the English and Chinese parenthesis,and the punctuation that marks a parenthesis.Accordingly,the author has adopted four methods to deal with the parenthesis,which are keeping the original sentence order,using brackets,embedding and pre-positioning.In addition,this report uses the compensation theory to compensate for the loss occurs during translation.Methods such as amplification,specification and generalization are applied to compensate for the loss at lexical level.The loss at grammar level is compensated by transforming of the adverb of time,words with passive meaning and words with plural meaning.Loss at discourse level is solved by adding logical conjunction words and transforming of person deixis.Through this report,the author finds that the four methods above and the compensation theory are useful guidance for the translation of parenthesis,and the quality of the source text is improved.It is hoped that this study can offer some insight to later translation studies concerning a biographical text.