A Report On The Translation Of A Perfect Life (Excerpt)

Nowadays, the global communication becomes more rapid and frequent than the past days, novel as a form of mass cultural products increasingly booms and expands in overseas markets, playing an important role in cross-cultural exchanges and communications. Recent years, more and more people has an increasing interest in reading English popular novels and their Chinese translation versions. Therefore, the translation of popular novels becomes a necessary process for cross-cultural communication. This translation report based on the practice of American best-seller novelist Danielle Steel’s popular novel A Perfect Life, which summarizes the translation experience and analyzes the inflection during the translation process combining lots of typical cases.The author of the report selects semantic translation and communicative translation theory of Perter Newmark as the theoretical basis for this translation report, and introduces six translation skills used in the practice process. The six skills are literal translation, literal translation plus annotation, amplification, substitution, division and restructuring. The author of report hopes that the translation report realizes two purposes. The first is to introduce and apply the theory of semantic translation and communicative translation and examine the guiding role of the theory which plays in the translation practice. The other is to provide some useful skills for popular novel translation. It is hoped that the report can be illuminating and beneficial for future English-Chinese translation of popular novels.