A Report On The E-C Translation Of Uncle Silas Volume One (Excerpt)

As a unique style of tale, gothic novel, which is often shrouded in mystery and terror, has its unique narrative style and artistic charm. They were famous in the eighteenth to nineteenth century in Europe, while it was until 1980s that domestic scholars began to attach due importance in this field and its translation.This translation project of Uncle Silas which is in the charge of the writer’s tutor Professor Bo Zhenjie is a subproject of the English-Chinese translation of classic thrillers from Penguin books. As a member of this translation team, the writer is in charge of the translation task of the first volume.The novel is a first person narrative told from the view of the teenaged Maud Ruthyn in 1840s. The first volume of the book describes Maud’s life at Knowl when a new French governess, Madame de la Rougierre, comes to Maud’s life. However, the French woman turns out to be a hypocritical person who tries hard to get the information of Austyn Ruthyn’s will. As a family honor protector, Austyn Ruthyn, knowing he is dying of the angioma in his heart, determined to make Maud to live with Silas, the sinner of the family, to clear his brother Silas’s name so as the family’s name could be cleared as well.This report is guided by Nida’s functional equivalence theory and composed on the basis of the translation from chapter 6 to chapter 11 in volume one. The report can be divided to four parts. The first chapter is the introduction part. It includes the background information and the organization of this report. The second chapter demonstrates the preparation works before translation includes source text analysis, theory preparation and translation tool preparation. The third chapter analyzes the problems met in the translation. Specifically, translation problems met at lexical level, syntactic level and stylistic level are discussed. The last chapter is the conclusion part which gives a general finding and suggestions of this report. The report finds that the translator should not only focus on the formal equivalence, but also pay more attention on functional equivalence of the target text during translation. That is to say, the successful transfer of the information is the priority in translation. In order to gain functional equivalence, cultural factors and the original style of the source text should been taken care of so that the target readers could have the same or similar reading experience as the original readers. The main aim of this report is to find some specific approaches to translate gothic novels, and provide some possible help for other translators.