A Report On Translating The Great Hoggarty Diamond

The report is based on my translation practice of The Great Hoggarty Diamond written by William Makepeace Thackeray. With the topic of "speculation and corruption in the business field", The Great Hoggarty Diamond reveals the dark side of the upper class in an ironical twist. So far, there is no Chinese version of the book. Thus my practice would help Chinese reader to know more about the capitalist England in the Victoria era.The present translation is conducted under the guidance of Newmark’s text typology. The translator first categorized the short story as a "vocative" text. A vocative text is reader-oriented and is intended to make the readers think, feel and act. Therefore, the translator takes Peter Newmark’s communicative translation as the guidance theory. The communicative translation takes readers as center, aiming to "produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original". In this report, the translator adopts case studies to analyze the story’s syntactic, lexical and dialogic features. By using communicative translation, the translator attempts to render the translated text with readability and appeal. The rearrangement of sentence structure, the conversion of word class and the use of four-character phrases are all applied in the process of translation. With this report, the translator means to summarize the translation practice which might offer some references for future translation of this novel, and to arouse more Chinese readers’interests in The Great Hoggarty Diamond.