A Report On The Translation Of Sinclair Lewis’s Land

Sinclair Lewis was the first writer from the United States who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the literary world, Sinclair Lewis had a pivotal role.In this study, Land, a novel selected from Go East, Young Man, the short story collection of Sinclair Lewis edited by Sally E. Parry was chosen as the translation material. The protagonist of this novel is Sidey, a dentist who wants to go back to the Vermont farm eagerly but is blocked by obstinate obstructions.The report comprises three parts:the source text, the translated version, and the cases study. The cases study elaborates specific translation issues and relevant solutions at three levels: lexical, syntactical and dialogue level. Meanwhile, this report explores how communicative translation theory is applied to improve the quality of the translation. At lexical level, the author discusses the translation of names, conversion, and the application of Chinese four-word phrases. At syntactical level, the author mainly adopts amplification, division and inversion. As one of Lewis’s writing characteristics, the source text contains a lot of descriptions of dialogue. Therefore, the author explores the translation of dialogues in the source text from the perspective of the linguistic style of character dialogues and the roles of character dialogues. As an effective communication between people, dialogues appear frequently in this novel. They can reflect the character’s inner world and personality directly. Dialogues in this novel are vivid and easy to understand. The author proves it mainly from four aspects:intonation processing, proper use of colloquial words, semantic expression and emotional processing. Dialogues help the writer to shape characters, advance the plot and tone up the expressive force. Readers can get better understanding of the characters and American culture through dialogues.Last but not least, the author has made a conclusion from three levels:lexical, syntactical and dialogue level. The author hopes this report can provide other translators with some useful suggestions on English fiction translation, and wish more and more translators can participate in literary translation.