On The Translation Of The English Travel Essay

This paper consists of two parts:translation and critical commentary. The original text for translation part is excerpted from The Wild Places, a bestseller written by British writer Robert Macfarlane. This book is composed of 15 chapters, in which the author made a series of journeys in search of the wild places that remained in Britain and Ireland. As a travel essay, the original text has fresh and natural style, as well as simple but meaningful language. The whole text is rich with artistic charm and aesthetic value. By analyzing actual examples from the translation process, I discuss how to translate English travel essays into Chinese from three aspects, namely, to obtain an accurate understanding of the original, to convey the message appropriately and naturally in the translated version, and to pay great attention to wording and phrasing. In my opinion, in order to produce a good translated version, one should have a thorough understanding of the original text. And to achieve this goal, one should not only have a good command of English, but also possess relevant life experience and background knowledge. Besides, one is expected to give full play to the imagination during translation. Secondly, one should express the message faithfully and smoothly and use authentic Chinese. In this part I also discuss two translation skills:the change of parts of speech and semantic explication; the extraction of words and reinvention of sentence structures. Last but not the least, great attention should be paid to wording and phrasing in essay translation. The choice of words and building of sentence should be in accordance with the context and artistic conception. What’s more, one should make the best of the beauty of Chinese language, such as using four-character structures to increase the literary grace of the translated text.