A Report On The Translation Of The Joy Luck Club

This report is based on the translation of the first two chapters of The Joy LuckClub---a novella written by the Chinese American writer Amy Tan. It is through thenarration of the mother-daughter relationship in the four immigrant families thatrevealed the predicament they were confronted with in the America society. Thesource text contains a host of unusual linguistic phenomena which triggered theauthor’s great interest, such as wide use of Romanized Pinyin, the retaining of“broken English” to highlight their identities, and the like. All of these featurescontribute to the success of the novel.According to Eugene Nida, translating consists in reproducing in the receptorlanguage the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message, first in termsof meaning and secondly in terms of style. Thus, reproducing the language features inthe original book pose challenges to translators inevitably.With dynamic equivalence as the guiding principle, the author took arduousefforts to translate the selected chapters of the novel. On the basis of the translation,the author summed up her experience and studied some typical cases at the lexical,syntactical, and paragraph level.In literary translation, the translator should adopt various translation strategiesaccording to different cases, and pay attention to the stylistic features. In that way, thetranslation could represent literary value of the original works, and create similar effectson target readers. By representing the translation process, this report intends toillustrate that translation should reproduce the language style in the original text underthe guidance of translation theory.