A Report On The Translation Of The Hunter’s Wife

This MA thesis is based upon a report on the author’s Chinese translation of the English short story The Hunter’s Wife, which was written by the famous American novelist Anthony Doerr. The choice of translating this story was done not without reasons. One reason is its content which tells a hunter’s true affectional story that expands as long as20years, ranging from his encounter, love and marriage to his wife to the break down of his marriage and the final reconciliation. The whole story is full of ups and downs as well as humanitarian care. And the other reason is that the writer is new to us Chinese readers, though he is an outstanding novelist who won numerous awards in his lifetime. As The Hunter’s Wife is a great book that needs to be introduced to our Chinese readers, translating such a moving story is of great significance to enlarge its influence as well as giving me a good chance to improve my translation ability, thus worth giving it a try. And this thesis is actually the summary of my personal experience in doing such a translation. The main contents of the paper are of five parts. Part One is the introduction, describing the project background, offering a literature review and giving a profile of its objectives and significance to literary translation. Part Two is the task process which concentrates on the previous preparations of the translation project, including the types of the literature, text message, text characteristics, translating and proof reading afterwards. Part Three and Four address such issues as the theatrical basis and case studies. Under the guidance of Reiss’s translation theory, this thesis describes the Chinese translation of The Hunter’s Wife and discusses in details the restructuring and reorganization in discourses. Taking into account the writing style of the source text which is simple and concise, yet dispersive and sophisticated, the paper addresses the issues of restructuring and reorganizing the source text in the Target Language from three aspects-sentence, paragraph and discourse, focusing on how the Chinese translation can cater to the aesthetic and reading habits of Chinese readers. Meanwhile, it also mentions some room that this paper is hoped to improve. The last part is the concluding remark of the whole paper, including the summary of Reiss’s translation theory adopted in the case studies and further studies that need to be made concerning this topic. And it is also hoped that such a case study can and will make some contributions to the studying of the Chinese translation of Doerr’s novels.