A Report On E-C Translation Of Uncle Silas (Excerpt From Volume â…¢)

Novel translation is a significant part of literary translation. The translation of English novels in Chinese provides not only the opportunities for Chinese readers to know about western literature and culture, but also beneficial reference for the development of Chinese novels. This project as one subproject of the project of translating horror fictions of Penguins Classics into Chinese is the translation of a long gothic novel Uncle Silas from English to Chinese. The author’s supervisor Professor Bo Zhenjie is in charge of this project and the author as a member assumed the translation of the third volume.In the third volume of Uncle Silas, Silas Ruthyn and Dudley Ruthyn tried every means to capture Maud’s properties but failed, then they attempted to kill her yet her governess Madame de la Rougierre became the victim, and at last with the help of Meg and Tom Brice, she succeeded in escaping to Feltram. A great deal of language depiction, mental depiction, action depiction, portrait depiction and environment description is adopted in the novel to characterize and promote the development of the plot, which also demonstrates the gothic novel feature of horror.This report is based on the translation of nine chapters of the third volume, from Chapter 13 to Chapter 21, within the theoretical framework of Eugene Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory. The whole report consists of four parts. Chapter One generally introduces the project, the bibliographical information, the significance and the structure of the report. Chapter Two presents the source text analysis, the preparation of guiding theory and translation tools and the translation process. The third chapter analyzes the translation methods and techniques of the depiction of language, mentality, action, portrait and the environmental description under the Functional Equivalence Theory as well as in compliance with the gothic novel features. The last part is the conclusion,in which translation methods and techniques of gothic novel and deficiencies in translation and translation process are summarized. Translators should comprehend the source text well and flexibly make use of such methods and techniques as literal and liberal translation, restructuring, conversion, amplification, division of long sentences to reproduce the content and artistic style of the original text and make the translated text readers get similar response as the source text readers. The author explores the translation of a gothic novel in this report in the hope of being helpful to other translators on the translation of this kind of novel.