Reproducing The Beauty Of The Original

In literary translation, reproducing the beauty of the original is a major task for thetranslator besides achieving the faithfulness and the expressiveness. It requires the translatornot only to fully understand the deep meanings of the original text but also to reproduce themaccurately and tactfully to the target readers. Therefore, this report aims at analyzing how toreproduce the beauty of the novel in accordance with the writing features of the original texts.The book to be translated in this report is a best-selling novel, named The Light BetweenOceans written by M. L. Stedman. The book tells an engrossing and touching story about alighthouse keeper, Tom, and his wife, Isabel, who discover a dead man and a crying babywashed ashore on their island off the coast of Australia. The choice that Isabel nurses the childas her own has shattered many lives, including their own, and finally they are confronted withmoral dilemma. In this novel, the author goes on a great length to describe the poeticdescriptions, well-drawn characters and good use of symbolism to develop the gripping plotsand provoke deep thinking about morality, war, human nature and love.Based on the analysis of the original texts, the translator finds that the book mainly hasthree features and tries to focus on these three perspectives: the environmental description,character images and symbolism. Meanwhile, the whole process was carried on following YanFu’s three principle—“Faithfulness, Expressiveness, Elegance” to guarantee the quality of thetranslated versions. Therefore, this report is divided into four parts. The first two parts brieflyintroduces the reasons why the translator chose the book as a translation material and thepreparations before, during, and after translating the texts to show how the reportimplemented methodically through several months. In the case study part, the translatordiscusses about how to reproduce the beauty of the original in the aspects of environmentaldescriptions, character image, and the symbolism with some typical examples picked out fromher translation. And the last part concludes the major findings, limitations, implications andsuggestions for the writing of similar reports. Through this report, the writer hopes to point out that translators should pay dueattention to the reproduction of beauty of the original in literary translation based on a carefulresearch of the original texts.