A Report On The E-C Translation Of Prairie Fire:The American Dreams Of Laura Ingalls Wilder(Excerpts)

This is an E-C translation practice report,of which the source text is an excerpt from the literary biography Prairie Fire: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser.The heroine of this biography is Laura Ingalls Wilder,a renowned American children’s book writer.Under the historical background of the American West from 1800s to the early 1900s,the book narrates her legendary life in a fair and objective tone,vividly exhibiting the American pioneer spirit passed down for generations.Based on text analysis,it is found that the source text used in this practice is a mixture of the expressive text and the informative text,which emphasizes both historicity and literariness.Therefore,the major tasks that need to be solved are precise reproduction of information and of aesthetic elements.Under the guidance of the Functional Equivalence Theory proposed by Eugene A.Nida,cases are chosen to explore translation methods for the precise reproduction of information from two aspects,namely the precise representation of semantic information and the clear representation of syntactic logic,and translation methods for the reproduction of aesthetic elements of rhetoric devices.Some practical experience in dealing with biographical translation is summarized after completion of the project.First,the analysis of stylistic features is vital to determining the translation focuses.Second,the Functional Equivalence Theory plays an instructive role in translation of literary biography,which allows the translator to flexibly adjust linguistic forms of the source text,to adopt the translation strategy of domestication,and to stress upon the equivalence of communicative effects.And the translator realizes that the literariness of the source text can be explored from the perspective of the writing style in future translation of the biographical literature.