A Report On The E-C Translation Of "Lyric Adaptations"

The report is based on the English-Chinese translation practice of “Lyric Adaptations”,the seventieth chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century English Poetry.The source text comes from the translator’s supervisor’s references for the National Social Science Fund Project “the Stylistic Study on Carol Ann Duffy’s Poetry”,and there is currently no Chinese translation for it.The source text gives an analysis of British poetry in the late twentieth century based on the introduction to five influential British poets and their poems at the time,clarifying how the efforts of these poets aiming to break the predicament of narrowness came to naught in the end.Under the guidance of George Steiner’s Fourfold Motion Theory,the translator analyzed how to inform the target readers the text content faithfully and understandably.The report consists of five parts.The first part is task description,mainly introducing the source text and the translation task.The second part is a description of the translation process,including preparation before translation,problems confronted in the translation process,and proofreading and evaluation.The third part is the theoretical framework,which introduces the development of Hermeneutics and its application in translation study,including George Steiner’s Hermeneutic Fourfold Motion Theory which considered translation as a four-step process,namely trust,aggression,incorporation and compensation.The fourth part is case analyses,analyzing the application of the Fourfold Motion Theory in translation practice.The first step“trust” requires the translator to get the knowledge of British poetry in the latter twentieth century and the five poets mentioned in the text,to realize the value of the translation;the second step requires the translator to “invade” the source text to fully comprehend its meaning,which is the most difficult due to the professional content and complicated sentences;the next step is to incorporate different translation techniques such as negation,conversion and restructuring for the representation of the source text;the last step is to compensate when the text is unbalanced due to the differences between the author and the translator in their languages and thinking modes,and the involvement of special areas of expertise.The fifth part is the conclusion,which makes a summary of the translation report and points out the translator’s gains from the practice.