A Translation Report On The First Four Chapters Of Richard Yates Up Close: The Writer And His Works

Richard Yates is one of the greatest writers at the Age of Anxiety in America,but he is not popular among the public readers. Hence, the author translated the first four chapters of Up Close to Richard Yates: the Writer and His Works written by Martin Naparsteck as the material for her practice, which will make Yates known to Chinese readers who want to explore his life, works and writing style. This work has no Chinese version at present.This report firstly makes a brief introduction of the source text, the background as well as the significance of the translation practice. In the chapter of case studies,the author employs relevance theory and translation shifts as guidance to analyze the translation practice. Some difficult problems in terms of semantics, syntax and pragmatics have been explored from the perspective of contextual inference of implicatures and explicatures, level shifts and category shifts.Through the practice, the author finds that the implications and explications will help translator make inferences of the communicator’s intention, based on relevance theory. By getting rid of the form of the source text, the rendition will be expressed more freely and fluently. Moreover, the application of translation shifts theory can help solve some lexical and grammatical difficulties in translation.