A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Urban Romance Novel I In Big City,You In Small Town From The Perspective Of Chesterman’s Translation Norms Theory

In recent years,the rapid development of the social economy has accelerated the process of urbanization.The survival dilemma,workplace competition,and emotional problems of young people in the metropolis have become more and more serious.In this context,urban romance novels are experiencing an upsurge of creation.This kind of novel can reflect the living conditions and spiritual predicament of contemporary people.Therefore,the study of Chinese-English translations of romance novels can not only facilitate English reader’s understanding of the material and civilized features of contemporary society in China,but also enrich the translation practice and research cases of romance novels,and provide some references for the translation practice and research of similar texts.The translation practice of the romance novel,I in Big City,You in Small Town,is accomplished under the guidance of Chesterman’s Translation Norms Theory.The language of this novel is plain and colloquial,making it easy for readers to accept and understand.This requires the translator to fully understand the meaning of the original text in the translation process in order to ensure the translation is acceptable to the reader.Taking into account the multiple stakeholders involved in translation activities,Chesterman’s Translation Norms Theory formulates expectation norms and professional norms from the reader’s perspective and the translator’s perspective respectively.To satisfy the above norms,Chesterman puts forward different strategies at three levels:syntactic,semantics,and pragmatics which have a high theoretical applicability to the present translation practice.Under the guidance of these norms and strategies,at the syntactic level,the author adopts strategies such as lexical conversion,morphological conversion,and sentence structure change to convert the original text and output sentences that conform to the grammatical conventions of the target language,so as to meet expectations of the readers.At the semantic level,through the use of strategies such as amplification and omission,changing rhetoric,and adjusting the order of words,the author conveys the meaning of the original text clearly and completely to achieve the goal of conforming to professional norms.At the pragmatic level,the author applies the methods of naturalization,explication,and in-text annotation to reduce the communicative barriers arising from cultural differences and to meet the communicative norms.This report consists of four parts.The first part is a description of the translation task,including an introduction to the background of the translated text,the characteristics of the translated text,and the requirements of the client.The second part is a description of the translation process,which includes the pre-translation preparation stage,translation implementation stage,and post-translation revision stage.The third part is the case study,in which the author analyzes and interprets the strategy choices at the three levels of grammar,semantics,and pragmatics based on the typical cases.The last part is a summary of translation practice.