A Report On Translation Of Memoir (Excerpt)

This report is an analysis of Irish novelist John McGahern’s Memoir and its translation process. This autobiographic novel is about the experience of John McGahern’s youth age. Father, one of the main characters in the novel, is temperamental, irritable and violence-prone, whose behavior gives deep psychological impact on the author.This report is done on the basis of E. A. Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory. It mainly discussed how to do the translation of Father’s behavior. The behavior translation should coincide to father’s personality and express father’s emotion in different situations. In addition, appropriate translation techniques like amplification, extension and restructuring should be applied to achieve functional equivalence in the lexical and sentential level. So the priority is to bring target language readers a reading experience similar to that which was intended to be enjoyed by source language readers.According to the designed conception, this thesis firstly gives a brief introduction to the author, John McGahern and his work, Memoir. Secondly, this thesis introduces the whole process of translation, including preparation before translation and proofreading after translation. Chapter three gives a brief introduction to the theoretical basis of the thesis. The next part is to analyze translation difficulties and solve these problems under the guidance of functional equivalence theory. In conclusion, major findings of this thesis are summarized and several suggestions for future study are also put forward.