A Report On The Translation Of Child Of God (Excerpt)

The translation material comes from the novel, Child of God, one of Cormac McCarthy’s earlier novels. As a renowned contemporary American writer, Cormac McCarthy always puts his characters in the wilderness. In this novel, Lester Ballard is stripped of his house estate and has to haunt the wilderness of East Tennessee and preys on the residents with his strange lusts, finally turning out to be a marginalized person with his death in a hospital. The theory of Functional Equivalence is taken as a theoretical guidance to translate McCarthy’s famous novel with the combination of some other translation strategies and methods. Extending, conversing and splitting are adopted with the consideration of equivalence at lexical level, and literal translation, liberal translation and three other translation methods are also taken in terms of the equivalence of sentential level in the translation. All in all, all the techniques and strategies are taken in the translation for the purpose of the achievement that the receptor’s response is substantially similar to that of the original receptor on the original text.This report includes four chapters. A brief introduction to the writer, the novel and the significance of the translation practice is given in the first chapter. The preparation before translation, the theoretical guidance in translation and the proofreading after translation are mentioned in the second chapter. Some difficult points and their related translational strategies and methods during the translation process are summed up in chapter three. Finally, this report also points out some major findings and suggestions in this translation project.