A Report On The Translation Of World So Wide

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was one of the most influential and preeminent American writers in the 1920s, as well as the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. As a master of realistic satirist, he was adept in creating conflicts and criticizing by means of detail description and characterization. The translation material selected for this translation practice is Sinclair Lewis’s last novel, World So Wide (1951), which was posthumously published.This study, based on the first four chapters of World So Wide, is under the guidance of semantic translation and communicative translation, which were firstly put forward by the British translation theorist, Peter Newmark. During the process of translation, the author ran into some difficulties in the rendering of proper nouns, long and difficult sentences and rhetorical devices. Combined with translation theory and case study, this report analyses the most proper strategies so as to offer a satisfactory Chinese version to target-language readers. The translation report consists of five parts. Firstly, part one briefly introduces the background of the translation practice, the significance of the report and its structure. Part two focuses on the description of translation task. Then, part three expounds the detailed translation preparations and process, as well as the difficulties in translation. The next part, the key component of this report, is the analysis of typical and difficult cases from lexical, syntactic and discourse levels. Finally, the author summarizes gains and limitations during translation and report writing, and gives some suggestions for future study.It is demonstrated in this study that the combination of semantic translation and communicative translation can give better instruction to translation practice, and the author hopes to provide more insights and references for literary translators.