A Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of The Sojourners (Chapter 5-Chapter 6) Under The Guidance Of Christiane Nord’s Translation Theory

This is a report on the translation of the Chinese novel The Sojourners by Yan Geling,which analyzes the role of Nord’s translation theory in guiding literary translation with excerpted chapters from The Sojourners.This novel has created many vivid characters.With the ups and downs of these characters’ fates,the author explains the different charms of eastern and western cultures,and shows her deep concern for the marginal people in a particular period.In this translation report,Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 of this novel are excerpted as the source texts in this translation.Due to the characteristics of novel text,the translator encountered some problems in the process of translation,such as culture-loaded words,adjustment of sentence order,treatment of cohesive devices and so on.By analyzing the practical problems encountered in the translation process,the translator adopts Nord’s Function plus Loyalty theory as a guide,analyzes and summarizes the text features of the source text,makes in-depth case analysis from three levels: lexical,syntactic and discoursal respectively,and discusses the translation difficulties,translation thinking as well as corresponding solutions,hoping to provide some experience for future translation of novels with similar text features.Under the guidance of Nord’s translation theory,the translator adopts literal translation,annotation and conversion of part of speech at lexical level to convey the meaning of specific words to readers clearly,completely and accurately.At syntactic level,according to different sentence structures,the translator adopts translation techniques such as combination,adjustment of sentence order and conversion of sentence voice,which makes sentences fluent and more in line with institutionalized English expression.At the discoursal level,the translator mainly discusses how to flexibly deal with the cohesion devices to achieve coherence of the target discourse and how to deal with the rhetorical devices to reproduce the vivid descriptions in the original text.