On Translating Fictional Conversations

As a report on English-Chinese translation of A Tragedy of Two Ambitions, this thesis aims to describe one translation project organised by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP) in2012and completed by the author on his own. Focusing on conversations in the novel, it intends to study the correlation between translation quality and translating methods of fictional conversations.Conversations with a strong colloquial feature serve as a significant way to present readers fictional characters’personalities in a novel. It seems to be of necessity to deal with these conversations in the target text for representation of a character’s personality. However, it seems to be a challenge to complete this tough task because the spoken language usually varies when speakers are of different ages, in different situations, or even in different moods. When it comes to methods of translating fictional conversations, the translator has tried his best to achieve the effects of’three coincidings’—translation coinciding with characters’identities and roles, translation coinciding with characters’habits and personalities, and translation coinciding with the environment or situations. That is, instead of being satisfied with the faithfulness, a translator is supposed to keep the original features of fictional conversations; he is also expected to apply suitable words to according with characters’identities in a concrete context, and to reproduce conversations where the readers of a target language can feel the same as the readers of the source language do. On the basis of the’three coincidings’, the author attempts to probe into translation methods of fictional conversations, and achieves the artistic effects to substitute or reproduce fictional conversations.Through describing and analyzing the translated works, it is found that a fictional conversation is an efficient way to shape characters, depict objective environment and push forward the plot in a novel. In the progress of translating, the following approaches can be taken to reach the artistic effects of reproducing fictional conversations:(1) using dialects;(2) accordingly employing vulgar speeches and non-standard language or even mis-spellings;(3) utilising modal particles;(4) applying modal verbs and imperative sentences;(5) abnormally utilizing four-character phrases, idioms and honorifics.It is hoped that this report offers some referential value for the translation of fictional conversations.