A Report On The E-C Translation Of Paradise From The Perspective Of Context Adaptation Theory

This is an English-Chinese translation report.The original text is selected from the novel Paradise(1994)by the Zanzibar(now part of Tanzania)writer Abdulrazak Gurnah.It mainly tells the story of Yusurf,a 12-year-old boy who was sold by his father as a laborer,grown into an adult over the past eight business travel.The story is set against the background of East Africa where the people live under the influence of colonization.At present,there is no relevant translation of the book in China.Dialogue,which plays an important role in shaping the characters,promoting the development of the plot,and stimulating the readers’ interest in reading,is generally regarded as the most important and vivid part of the novel.There are a lot of dialogues in the original text,and the author introduces Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory as the theoretical basis of this translation report.Adaptation Theory holds the view that language use is a process of continuous choice,in which context and language structures counts a lot.Based on the analysis of the dialogue in the novel Paradise,the translator points out the difficulties encountered in translation practice from the view of language structures,including difficulties at lexical level: the culture-loaded words,polysemy;at syntactic level: subordinate clause and elliptical sentences;at discourse level: how to strengthen the coherence of discourse and highlight the characters’ personalities and emotions.To solve the above difficulties,the author focuses on the adaptation to different levels of communicative context,and adopts different translation methods,including transliteration plus annotation,semantic choice based on context and semantic extension;reinventing sentence structures and adding words;changing the original cohesive devices and using modal particles.From the perspective of contextual adaptation,with 14 examples selected from the novel,the author discusses how to use different translation methods to solve translation difficulties and complete translation practice.