A Report On The Translation Of Mr. Mercedes(Chapter One- Chapter Two)

This is an English-Chinese translation report based on the materials from the novel Mr. Mercedes published by Scribner in June 2014. The novel is a detective fiction that describes a story of “a police catching a criminal”. Its protagonists are an old retired detective and an abnormal murderer who drives a Mercedes-Benz. For this report, the author selected Chapter One and Chapter Two as translation materials, which have more than 10,000 words. Chapter One describes the massacre in the job fair, and Chapter Two describes the old detective’s decadent and terrible life after retirement.The report describes the process of translation, including the pre-translation preparation, the application of the translation tools, the translation strategies employed, and translation skills used as well as the proofreading of the translated version. The author analyzed the text comprehensively and found that Stephen King created some new words in the novel. To accurately translate these new words is one of the key and difficult points in translation. In addition, some culture-loaded words and proper nouns in the novel contain two meanings, literal meaning and implicit meaning. Finding accurate and perfect translations for these words is another difficult point. The focus of the report is case analysis. The report chooses the typical examples to analyze the application of domesticating strategy, translator’s subjectivity, parallel texts and amplification in translation. Finally, the report summarizes the translator’s findings, limitations, and implications. The translator should play the translator’s subjective role fully to translate the new words coined by Stephen King creatively.