A Report On The E-C Translation Of Small Tales Of A Town (Chapter 8-11)

The material for this translation practice is excerpted from the novel Small Tales of a Town by the Australian writer Susan Webster.The excerpt from chapter 8 to 11 is a combination of four stories: Day of the Carrot,The Call to Freedom,Budgie Calls and Father and Son.The text contains vocabulary with rich denotation and connotation,as well as diversified sentence patterns.Short and long sentences are used alternatively in the text with the characteristic of large quantities of passive voice and impersonal subject sentences.Lexical,syntactic and textual analyses of certain cases are made in this report.Lexically,proper adoption of such techniques as conversion and negation enhances readability of the target text;Syntactically,appropriate subject conversion,voice conversion and splitting at relative clauses,targeted at the syntactic differences between English and Chinese,prompt the fluency of the translation.In translating long and complex sentences,the translator employs the techniques of splitting and explicitation to accommodate rules of Chinese;Textually,application of the explicitation of reference and logic promotes the coherence of the target text.Comprehensive employment of the translation techniques above can conform to Chinese writing convention and convey the source text accurately and faithfully,with possible reference for the sequential translation of Susan Webster’s works and contribution to the research of Australian literature translation.