A Report On The Translation Of Homegoing(Chapter 6～9)

The translation material is selected from Homegoing,one of the new representative works of African-American literature,written by Yaa Gyasi,an African-American female.Published in 2016,this fiction traces back on the slave trade in the 17 th century.It is featured by a large amount of colloquial Black English,which makes the narrative more vivid,diversified and marked.In translating,the translator identifies fours sorts of markedness,namely phonological markedness,grammatical markedness,pragmatical markedness and cultural markedness,with the guidance of markedness theory,and aims at reproducing the original language feature in the target text as much as possible.Considering the achievement of corresponding of phonological and grammatical markedness is nearly impossible,the translator adopts the technique of recasting to imitate the colloquial speech style,hoping to compensate the loss of Black English features.As for pragmatical markedness,the translator tries to reproduce the particular pragmatic intention in the target text.When it comes to the translation of cultural markedness,the translator uses literal translation if there is no linguistic or cultural gap.Otherwise,the translator will resort to other methods,such as paraphrasing,transliteration.And generally,a footnote will be inserted to provide supplementary information or reduce misunderstanding.The translation practice is of great significance for the translator in helping her latter translation.However,the limitations of the translation are to be noted.Firstly,the cultural connotations of the source text are inevitably lost in many cases due to cultural differences.Secondly,some expressions are still hard to understand,posing a big challenge to translation.