A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of "Edgar Laurence Doctorow"

Edgar Laurence Doctorow is an essay which introduces the main works of Edgar Laurence Doctorow. It briefly introduces Doctorow’s novels of different periods, including the main characters and important plots. In the essay, most of his famous works were presented to the readers, such as Daniel’s Book, Ragtime, Welcome to Hardtimes, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate and Loon Lake. Currently, academic works to introduce Doctorow in China are quite rare, which makes this essay more valuable. The author of the essay is not famous, however, he depicts the stories in a very sharp and unique way. And from his writing, we could not only obtain a general idea of Doctorow’s life, but also get to understand the contents of Doctorow’s works. The whole essay is about ten thousands words. And the translator translated it into fifteen thousands words in Chinese.The report is divided into five chapters. Chapter one focuses on the description of the translation task, the main content of the translation task, the task requirements and the framework of this report. Chapter two is the description of translation process, including preparation before translating, translation process and difficulties, feedback and revision of the translation. The third Chapter briefly introduces Peter Newmark and his translation theories of Semantic Translation and Communicative Translation, and his Informative Function and Vocative Function. The forth Chapter is the core of the whole report. It centers on cases analysis in four aspects:words translation, sentence translation, the translation of the figures of speech and the translation of the Doctorow’s writing style. Last but not the least, chapter five concluded the whole report. The translator introduced about some findings in the translation. Additionally, limitation and inspirations through translation practice were also introduced in the report.This report will help Chinese readers to know Doctorow and his novels better. The translator hopes that it will have some help to the study of Doctorow. Besides, the translator summed up some experiences and methods about translation in the report. Hopefully, they will be useful for other translators.