A Report On Translating The Cloud

John Fowles is a postmodernist English novelist who has earned an international reputation. As a representative of postmodernism, Fowles’s works are filled with the spirit of freedom and the color of mysticism. Meanwhile, he often employs multiple narrative voices in his works, which breaks the single narrative mode of traditional novels. Hence, Fowles’s works are big challenges to readers and translators.The Cloud is selected from The Ebony Tower, a collection of Fowles’s short stories published in 1974. It depicts a picnic vacation of two English families in the countryside of France. Catherine, the heroine of this story, has just lost her husband recently and is disturbed by great pain and disorderly thoughts. Her subtle and intricate inner world brings readers many difficulties in reading this story. On the other hand, this story is crammed with meticulous depiction of French rural scenery and discussions about cultural issues. To target readers, these exotic scenery and customs are neither familiar nor understandable. In addition, this short story has an unusual length of more than 20,000 words, and contains a large number of long and complex sentences or short and elliptical sentences. Those long and complex sentences are applied to depicting the natural scenery and the personalities of the characters, while those short sentences are mainly applied to displaying Catherine’s confused mind and recording the dialogues between the characters. As a result, the language of the story is sometimes lengthy and obscure, sometimes loose and incomplete.In view of the above, the translator chooses Peter Newmark’s Communicative Translation Theory as the guidance theory of this project. Keeping this theory at the back of mind, the translator flexibly deals with the translation of the long sentences and the short sentences from the source-text, intending to bridge the immense gap between cultures and languages.This report consists of five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction of this translation project, the creative features of The Cloud, and the Communicative Translation Theory. Chapter Two introduces the translation process of this project, including the introduction of this translation task, translation preparations, the difficulties and problems during the translation, and the modification after the translation. Chapter Three and Chapter Four respectively discuss how appropriate strategies are applied to the translation of long and complex sentences and short sentences under the guidance Communicative Translation Theory. Chapter Five summarizes the gains and limitations of this translation which might be helpful for future translation practices.