A Report On Translating The Stranger (Chapter1-5)

This translation report focuses on the E-C translation process of the excerpt from TheStranger as well as the analysis of the translation skills. The Stranger, one of the sciencefictions in Animorphs series, was written by American writer Katherine Alice Applegate.Along with J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps, they are nominatedas the world’s three best-selling children’s book. It also frequently appeared in the best-sellinglist of “Publishers Weekly”,“New York Times”,“Washington Post”,“Book Review Weekly”,“USA Today” and so on. There are twenty-two chapters in The Stranger, the author of thisreport selected the first five chapters, in the collection with a total number of11200Chinesecharacters as the ongoing translation task.This report is the summary of my translation practice. It boils down to four chapters. Thefirst chapter is an introduction, which includes the project background, brief introduction tothe author and the book, objective and significance of the project.The second chapter is process description which describes the pre-translation preparation,the process of translation and the after-translation management.Theoretical base---Skopos Theory and case analysis is the third chapter in which typicalwords and sentences are excerpted to account for the translation skills used by the translator.To illustrate the validity and exemplify the applicability of Skopos Theory in the translation ofchildren’s literature, the report gives an analysis of the translator’s version of The Strangerwithin the framework of this theory, in the hope of finding some insights into the practice andthe theoretical study of children’s literature translation. Based on the three rules of SkoposTheory, specific translation methods are adopted in the translation difficulties: translation ofdialogues, of foreign culture-loaded words and phrases and of psychology descriptions.The final conclusion part is a summary of the whole translation project, in which thetranslator presents the reflections as well as the limitations of the present report in expectationof being able to provide her suggestions on children’s literature translation in future.