A Report On The Translation Of The Real Thing

Henry James is an American novelist who is very active in the late19thand early20thcentury, whose novels have important influence not only in American literary history but alsoin the whole novel history. The Real Thing published in1892, is one of his middle and laterworks, and has simple plot, humorous language and profound thought.The current translation, written by Wu Ningkun, is included in the Daisy Millerpublished by Shanghai Translation Publishing House. However, there are some difficult andrarely-used words in the current translation which has put too much emphasis on forms andlead to redundant Chinese version, incongruous collocation and coherence. The reason for theabove-mentioned problem: One is that Wu Ningkun was born in1920, so his use of wordsmay be closely connected with the environments of the then era. Two is that long complexsentence and esoteric words are distinctive of Henry James’s middle and later style. HenryJames’s style, translator’s pursuit of formal correspondence and foreignization strategy lead tothe problem of nonfluency between sentences in Chinese version. The words close to themodern life are adopted in the new Chinese version, which uses the translation strategy tocombine liberal translation and literal translation to make the new translation smooth andnatural.