A Report On The Translation Of English Novel Coming From A Different Place (Excerpts)

This is a report on the translation of the English novel Coming From a Different Place by Nancy Carney.The novel describes Ona’s two months solitude in her aunt’s farm,expressing woman’s pursuit of equality,independence,freedom and a happy life.As it focuses on women’s lives and family issues,it may attract some Chinese readers and is of value in literature research.The translator selects the first four chapters as the source text of this report.The source text has 12,010 English words,and takes the translator three months to complete the task.He spends a month in reading Chinese parallel texts before translation,and the actual translation takes two months.Finally,according to the tutor’s suggestions and feedback from readers,he spends a month in revising the target text.The source text contains a lot of dialogues.Its language is plain,concise and fluent.How to choose appropriate words to translate is a big challenge.As its unique style is also difficult to be reproduced,and the translator tries to find natural equivalent of the source-language message.Finally,to make target text faithful,the translator tries to reproduce the ease of the source language.In translation,the original author,the translator and the readership are also taken into consideration.Therefore,under the guidance of Tytler’s Three Principles,the author of the report analyzes typical cases from four aspects: choice of word,adding connectives,transforming sentence patterns,and creating a new rhythm.The report consists of five parts.The first part is a general introduction of the report.The second part covers the analysis of source text,Tytler’s Three Principles of Translation,parallel texts,and a working schedule.The third part is about the translation process and the case analysis.The fourth part tells the feedback and translation strategies;the translator proposes three strategies: understanding the source text thoroughly,finding equivalent in style and reproducing the ease.In the end,the translator reviews the process of translation and of writing the report.Findings and limitations are also mentioned.This report is expected to offer help to other translators.