A Report On E-C Translation Of The Gin Sisters’ Promise (Chapter Three)

This report is based on the E-C translation of Chapter three of The Gin Sisters’ Promise.The chapter tells the story of three sisters who were estranged and reunited to hold a funeral for their father.It conveys the concept of blood being thicker than water and the beautiful qualities of forgiveness and tolerance and presents a vivid characterization and a lively storyline.This is a contemporary novel,which has no Chinese version yet.The source text contains many culturally specific idioms,long sentences,rhetoric and psychological descriptions.Before translation the translator had fully understood the personality traits of the different characters and consulted the materials to solve the linguistic and theoretical difficulties,but she still encountered obstacles such as words,idioms,dialogues and long sentences in the translation process.In the main part of this report,the application of Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation in this translation practice is analyzed in detail from lexical,syntactic,textual and rhetorical levels,and different translation techniques of conversion,repetition,shift of perspectives,omission,addition and division are explained and discussed elaborately.It can be seen that not only the content of the source text had been conveyed accurately,but also the translation conforms to the reading habit of the targeted reader.From this translation practice,the translator’s understanding of both semantic and communicative translation has been greatly deepened,and significantly the translator has become more able and proficient to employ various translation techniques to solve the problems and difficulties during translation.