A Report On The Translation Of By The Lake (Excerpt)

John McGahern is one of the most important novelists in contemporary Ireland. He has produced about thirteen books ranging from novels, short stories to plays. His works capture the rural landscape and family life of Ireland with precision and charm. His last novel, By the Lake, revealing his special writing style-concision, is chosen as the translation practice, and this report is done on the whole translation practice.The priority is to keep the same concise style as the original text in the translation, so this report aims to discuss how to translate the style of By the Lake with the research method of case study on the basis of the theory of style translation. As the stylistic markers, formal markers and non-formal markers are two important components in the theory, so translating the style is actually to translate formal markers and non-formal markers. Some main translation difficulties at formal and non-formal level which reflect the original style of concision are listed in the report and some representative cases are picked out for analyzing. Under the guidance of the theory of style translation, different stylistic markers are distinguished in the detailed examples and then translated into standard Chinese. To polish the translation, some translation methods such as proper addition or omission, rearrangement of word order and sentence order, corresponding sentence patterns and conversion of parts of speech are employed flexibly.