A Report On The Translation Of Diary Of An Ordinary Woman

Margaret Forster presents the “edited” diary of a woman, named Millicent King. Thisnovel is just like a memoirs, describing an ordinary woman lives through extraordinary timesin this brilliantly conceived and unputdownable journal of a life. The language of this novel issimple and unadorned. According to the style of this novel, I utilized the theory of Mr. FuLei---the Unification of Form and Spirit. It emphasizes the spirit, but not ignores the form.The spirit relies on the form, the form is the outermost shell of the spirit, and they areharmoniously existed. As we all known, the use of Chinese and English language is quitedifferent, so it is not easy to keep them in complete equivalence, especially the words.However, we should try our best to make its meaning and spirit equal to the original works.This novel is in the form of diary but the difference is that the diary has a long history. Itstarted from1914to1995, kept the record of the whole life of the author. I picked up theformer part of it and the author is13years old in this part, so her behavior is more or lessequipped with the characteristic of this age, such as the immature on thinking, talking andbehaving. I read this novel for many times before I began to translate. In the whole process oftranslation, I spare no effort to return to the original style and character of this young girl,especially her speech in order to make sure the unification between form and spirit. This is anEnglish novel, edited by VINTAGE RAND, the name is Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Itranslated it into 《一位平凡女人的日记》. The author is Margaret Forster, one of the bestpopular English novelists. She interviews the diary’s writer Millicent King whom she supposemaybe not easy-going. But to her surprise, this ordinary woman was quite warm-hearted andgave her diary to Margaret Forster. She read them again and again. Finally she found someextraordinary stories and then she decided to put them in order and publish it. This novel seems ordinary but if you keep reading it deeply, you will find more and more extraordinarythings. It not only makes readers known about the detail of the War and the history, but alsofeel the irretrievable pain of the ordinary family which caused by the Great World War.