A Report On The Translation Of Two On A Tower (Chapters1-5)

This is a translation project report on the excerpts from the first to the fifth chapters of Two on a Tower,a romantic story set amidst the Victorian age, by Thomas Hardy. The whole novel consists of41chapters,translated by7translators. And this report is based on the first five chapters，more than10,000words.The novel, published in1882, is romantic and fantasy, describing a love story that happened betweendifferent class-statuses and was not accepted by the society at that time. The first five chapters are thebeginning of the story, including lots of scenery introduction, personal dialogues with characteristics andunfamiliar cultures. These can help Chinese readers to get access to the rural culture background informationin England and to understand the whole story as well.The paper is guided by the translation theory, namely, translation-oriented text analysis model byChristiane Nord, which includes the extratextual factors, the intratextual factors and the functional hierarchyof translation problems. With the guidance of the text analysis model, translation strategies such asdocumentary translation and instrumental translation, are used to solve the difficulties in the translationprocess. For example, in view of the targeted readers’ absence of the source culture, the translator uses theannotated translation to help the readers to understand the plots. Other translation methods, such as thehomophonic form, negation, changing the sentence patterns, are also used to remain the features of theoriginal and to make the target text read smoothly.