The Effects Of Chinese Function Words In The Translation Of Dialogues In English Literature

Dead is Just a Dream is an English novel published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in September, 2013. The story is set in a mysterious town, and the characters include viragoes, vampires, werewolves, clowns, sorceresses, seers,Maras and psychics. This book contains a great number of dialogues, which make up the main body of the story line.In order to translate this novel into a highly accepted Chinese version, the translator should take full account of the target readers’ social experiences, aesthetic needs and ways of speaking. Unlike English words, Chinese characters do not change their forms with the changes of person, number, tense, case or voice.Therefore, Chinese function words play an important role in the grammatical system,and they are used frequently in daily communication.During the process of translating these dialogues in Dead is Just a Dream, the translator perceives it necessary to use a lot of Chinese function words to indicate the morphological changes of English words, such as using some adverbs of time or auxiliary words of tense to express the sequence of events, or some passive prepositions to point out the objects of actions. In addition, for the sake of providing the target readers with a more comfortable reading experience, the translator also uses some modal adverbs and modal auxiliary words to explain speakers’ moods and their attitudes towards what they are saying, and some interjections to convey speakers’ intense emotions, such as happiness, sadness, astonishment, indignation or agony.Based on the translator’s reflection and analyses of the translation practice, this report summarizes some related translation strategies and focuses on the method of using Chinese function words in translation. The main purpose of this report is to explore how to translate these lively dialogues so that the translation can reproducethe aesthetic characteristics of the original text, and at the same time provide the target readers with a comfortable reading experience.This report comes to a conclusion that using appropriate Chinese function words makes the fictional dialogues in the target text more consistent with the characters’ personal traits, and more useful for developing the plot. To be specific,by using these function words, the translated dialogues can provide the readers with more detailed information about the characters’ personal traits and the relationship between the characters, and make the characters’ images more vivid and memorable.To introduce the process of the translation practice and illustrate the study of the translation methods, this report is divided into four parts to describe the task,describe the process, explain the importance and effects of Chinese function words in dialogue translation, and make a conclusion of the translation practice.