A Translation Report On The Book Of Boy(Excerpts)

This translation project uses The Book of Boy,a thrilling children’s novel by well-known best-selling author Catherine Gilbert Murdoch,as the material,which tells the story of a boy and a pilgrim searching for seven relics through a medieval European hunt.Children’s literature,both entertaining and educational,can be relaxing and helpful for children readers to gain knowledge and build character.An excellent children’s literature translation not only provides an extracurricular reading material for Chinese children,popularizes foreign culture and shapes fortitude character,but also helps parents better understand the inner world of children.Judging from Newmark’s text type theory,The Book of Boy,mainly composed of Boy’s confession and dialogues with the pilgrim,belongs to an expressive one,which emphasizes the complete and accurate depiction of Boy’s thinking process.Meanwhile,as the story unfolded,the theme of calling on children to find their true selves gradually emerges,which conforms to the characteristics of vocative texts.Translating expressive texts requires complete and accurate information conveyance while retaining the original style.Therefore,semantic translation is employed in the translation to transmit the information of the source text to the fullest by figuring out the correct meaning of the original words,popularize the foreign culture by retaining culture-loaded words,preserve the vivid writing style by retaining the rhetorical devices and reproduce Boy’s thinking process by maintaining the original sentence structures.However,the cultural differences,the different writing habits and the low cognitive ability of children challenge the readability of the translation.Thus,communicative translation has also been employed to guarantee the readability of the target text,which gives full use to the communication function of vocative texts.This translation report,mainly composed of three aspects: translation process,case analysis and experience learned,aims to make some contributions to children’s literature translation and offer some valuable reference for researchers in this regard.