Practice Study Report On Translation Of The Waves (Excerpt)

This report is based on the translation of The Waves written by the British modernist writer Virginia Woolf. The Waves is regarded as a poetic novel, consisting of nine chapters in total. The author chooses the first chapter and parts of the second chapter as the material of this translation practice. The selected parts add up to 10,000 English words.The translation practice of The Waves is guided by the text typology, or text type theory, proposed by German translation theorist Katharina Reiss. According to Reiss, text can be divided into four types including expressive text, informative text, operative text and audio-medial text on account of functions. Different text types require different translation strategies. The Waves belongs to the category of expressive text. And one of the difficulties in its translation is the noticeable poetic language.In this report, translation materials including basic information of Virginia Woolf, The Waves and the outline of the excerpt are introduced. And the translation process is divided into three steps. Then Reiss’s text typology is described in detail and the application of this theory in the translation of The Waves is fully explained. After that, specific examples are studied on semantic level and syntactic level.Through exploration and discussion, the author finds out some techniques to deal with the translation of poetic novels represented by The Waves. Through inheriting rhymes, highlighting imageries and reproducing rhythms, the poetic style is recreated to a certain degree. Although drawback and limitation exist, it is sincerely expected that this report will offer some helpful references for related researches in the future.