A Report On The Translation Of The Gates (Excerpts)

This is a report on the translation of the excerpts of The Gates(2009), a mystery novel written for teenagers by a famous Irish novelist John Connolly. During the translation process, under the guidance of text type theory, skopos theory and system-functional linguistics, the translation of mystery novels from English to Chinese has been studied. Meanwhile, this report, by analysing relevant examples,focuses on dealing with such problems as how to apply the cohesion, coherence of the source text into the target text and summarizing more suitable and practicable translation strategies and methods.The main body of this paper is made up of four parts. Part 1 describes the background of the translation task, and briefly introduces the original writer and analyzes the source text and target readers. Part 2 is a description of the translating process, including the preparations, while-translating, quality control and proofreading. Part 3 provides case studies of the said translation with a detailed analysis of why certain translation theories and methods are adopted to satisfy the target language readers. In this part, domesticating and foreignizing strategies,together with several methods, which are oriented by problems, are elaborated in the light of text type theory, skopos theory and system-functional linguistics. Part 4 draws a conclusion about difficulties, limitations, and suggestions from the translation process.