Tylter’s Principles On Translation

This is a report on the translating of Revenge Wears Prada—The Devil Returns,written by Lauren Weisberger. The book is a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada whichhad been an international bestseller. In this book, it tells the story about Andy’s lifeafter she left Runway ten years ago, beginning to run her own magazine Plunge withher best friend Emily. The whole novel is humorous and interesting.The author tells the story in a colloquial way with lots of slang terms andconcrete descriptions to convert the words into vivid pictures. Such combinationmakes it more difficult to translate, keeping the original meaning and style in thetarget text. Besides, there are many brand names which do not make sense in thedictionary. How to handle this situation is also a problem for the translator. Therefore,during the translating process, the translator intends to keep the original meaning inthe target text and reproduce the vivid pictures.In order to solve the problems and achieve the effect, Tytler’s principles ontranslation is introduced. His translation principles include three aspects: first, thetranslation should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original work; second,the style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of theoriginal; third, the translation should have all the ease of the original composition.The importance of the three aspects is decreasing step by step. This report will mainlyfocus on the first aspect, which is to give a complete transcript of the ideas of theoriginal work in the translation. For ideas or meanings, British linguist GeoffreyLeech had mentioned seven types of meaning, which are conceptual meaning,connotative meaning, social meaning, collocative meaning, thematic meaning,reflected meaning and affective meaning. In addition, differences of cultures betweeneastern and western, as well as the comparison of translation concepts between Tytlerand Yan Fu, are also discussed in the report as supplements.To sum up, translating this kind of novel boasts the benefits, including entertaining yourselves, appreciating the modern language, and increasing the abilityto solve the problems encountered during the translation process. All the methods aresubject to appreciating the original meaning and style in the translation.