A Report On The Translation Of The Woman Upstairs (Chapters 1 To 4) From English Into Chinese

This report is on the translation of The Woman Upstairs (Chapters 1 to chapter 4) from English into Chinese. The novel was written by Clare Messud, one of the prominent novelists in contemporary American literature. Messud prefers adopting tender and spicy sharp strokes to depict different characters. The Woman Upstairs is about the contradiction between a woman’s responsibility and self-realization. In the story the single woman has devoted herself to the whole family but has always treated as a subordinate. The Woman Upstairs was ranked as one of the ten fictional bestsellers in 2013 by The Wall Street Journal.The translation report focuses on the problems in the translating of the novel and the corresponding methods to deal with them. The characters in the original work have distinct characteristics of times, and the language is close to the life as the modern English, but there are a lot of dialogues and long and complicated sentences. In order to tackle the problems, various translation skills have been used. Translation skills of words selecting and transformation are applied when translating the difficult words. In order to retain the original spoken English features and make the Chinese version more vivid and colloquial, the methods of adding and omitting are applied in the dialogue translation. According to the context, translation skills of splitting and restructuring methods are applied when translating the long and complicated sentences.Based on the detailed analysis on the translation of some long and complicated sentences and the dialogues as well, the paper aims to explore the available tactics in translating English novels into Chinese ones. The author of the report also hopes to offer some useful information to those who are interested in Clare Messud and her works and something helpful to those who intend to translate the novel by Clare Messud.