A Report On Translation Of The Mistress Of Nothing (Chapter 1-4)

The translation report discusses the translation of The Mistress of Nothing (2009), a novel by Canadian writer Kate Pullinger. The author selected the first four chapters of this novel as source text for this translation practice project. The novel is deft in the choice of words, straight and sometimes sharp in expressing the ideas. In content, the novel presents a lush portrait of a forbidden love, and a painterly picture of the 19th century Egypt.The author chose the cognitive theories of translation to guide the translation practice. The theory views translation as process of comprehending the cognitive processes behind language, and the reconstructing of those cognitive processes in another language for target language readers. In case studies, the author chose the theory of Shift in Perspective in cognitive theories of translation studies, borrowed from American linguist Ronald Wayne Langacker, as theoretical foundations of her analysis. Guided by the theory, the author analyzed the examples from the translation practice on syntactic, inter-syntactic, and inter-textual levels. Within the sentence, the shift takes place mainly between the passive voice and the active voice, the negative form and the positive form, the non-human subject and the human subject, the static and the dynamic form, the specific to general order and the general to specific order; for sentences, the shift takes place mainly between different use of rhetorical devices, and the long sentences and short sentences; for the text as whole, the shift takes place mainly between different cohesive devices and logical preferences. The translation practice illustrates that in translating literary texts from English into Chinese, the translator may adjust the internal structure of the sentence in the target text by adapting perspectives in voice, form, subject, status and order of the sentences to the target text. The translator may change the sentence itself in the target text by reconstructing the rhetorical images, and adopting new words, and structures to deal with the rhetorical devices used in the source text, and applying natural flow translation, inverted translation and division to deal with long sentences prevalent in English texts. The translator may maintain the textural feature of the target text by using substitution, omission and addition to deal with the shift in the use of cohesive devices from English to Chinese, by employing liberal translation and explicitation to handle the shift in logic from English text to Chinese text. By following these suggestions, the translator can achieve fluency and accuracy in the target text, which leads to similar aesthetic effects of the translation work.