Selected E-C Translation Of The Short Fiction Of Norman Mailer And A Critical Commentary

This project selected and translated three stories, The Paper House, The Notebook and The Language of Men of Part Ⅳ, The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer, published by Dell Publishing Co., Inc. in 1967. Norman Mailer was a 2-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and was a several-time nominee of the Nobel Prize for literature. Many of his works are not widely known to Chinese readers yet, but as "the most American" writer, his works are doubtlessly must-reads. A small number of his works have been translated into Chinese and published in China, while most have not, including The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer. The Paper House and The Language of Men both tap into the life of several American soldiers stationed in Japan after World War Ⅱ, and probe into their inner working of minds to reveal the changes that were taking place in the post-war era. The Notebook, reflects a writer’s helpless state in love, where his habitual nitty-gritty observation and dissection of almost everything inflicts his lover and himself with smothering trouble and pain.The project is composed of two sections:1. translation, including the original text and the translated text, and 2. a critical commentary that contains five parts. Part 1 is the introduction to the project, introducing Norman Mailer, the original text, the process of translation, and literature review and the significance of the project; Part 2 tells difficulties in translation; Part 3 introduces Eugene A. Nida’s theory of Functional Equivalence, the guideline of the project; Part 4 analyzes the translation strategies employed in the project at the lexical level and syntactic level; Part 5 is the conclusion.The background of writing and the language of the original text should be well explored, which are what cause difficulties for the translation. Considering the differences between English and Chinese languages and cultures, Functional Equivalence theory is of great relevance to the translating of the stories. The translator has adopted a variety of strategies in the translation, such as addition (amplification), repetition, omission, conversion, converting the passive voice into the active voice, restructuring (inversion or rearrangement), combination and division, and multi-strategy combination, in an attempt to be faithful to the source text and preserve its charm. In the critical commentary, the translator analyzes her application of Functional Equivalence from both lexical and syntactic perspectives.The translator hopes that this project may contribute a bit to promoting the awareness about Norman Mailer’s short fiction among Chinese readers.