A Report On The Translation Of The Artful Parent (Chapter11-14)

“The Artful Parent: Simple Ways to Fill Your Family’s Life with Art andCreativity” is a book on children’s early education and concerns about how to developthe art ability and creativity of the children from one to eight years old. The author, JeanVan’t Hul, is an American and graduated from Wellesley College majoring in art historyand studio art. With her experiences of being a mother cultivating her daughters’creativity and writing a blog on how to develop children’s art ability, she published thebook in2013. There are not many books of this kind in China and it gives enlightenmentto parents on how to apply the exploration of the art and creativity in daily life. The ideasand activities in the book are very novel and helpful. They shed insights into the artfulworld for both the mothers and the children.With a large amount of preparations and discussions, as well as assigning the task,the translator begins to translate the book. The preparation includes having a look at thewhole book first, knowing about the general style and tone of the author that areaccessible and approachable, as well as learning the translation theories, methods andtechniques once more. During the process of translation, a lot of problems areencountered and the method of explanation and conversion of the part of speech to give aproper translation of words are applied here. In addition, the techniques of reorganizingthe order of the modifiers and sentences, amplification and omission in translation, andrepetition of some parts to deal with the problems of sentences are also used. As far asthe figure of speech appeared in the source language, the translator tries hard to maintainit in the target language. However, there are still many other problems to deal with. Thus,the whole translation process is preceded under the guidance of Tytler’s three principlesof translation, Nida’s functional equivalence theory, and the method of Venuti’sdomestication and foreignization. These theories can help solve most of the problems andthe related examples are presented in the report. To be specific, adding notional words,adverbs, conjunctions, and repeating key words can help to remain loyal to original ideas,styles and fluency in the target language. To achieve the equivalence, literal and freemethods and combination of both are employed to translate the book. Domestication andforeignization help to make a clear idea for the readers of the materials they use and otherdetails in the book. As a result of translating the book, a large amount of information on how to developchildren’s art ability and creativity can be learnt and the application of the translationtheories to practice is improved as well. Cooperation and discussion play a veryimportant role in translation. Proofreading and revision are vital to have a bettertranslation. Although there are still some problems hard to solve, categorizing themeaning of words and giving them specific translation according to the concrete contextor in the certain sentences smooth the way for translation process.