A Report On The Translation Of A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing (Excerpts)

This report is based on the author’s translation practice of the first chapter of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. This novel is the debut novel of Eimear McBride. Owing to its particular expressive styles and the refined description of half-formed girl, McBride was awarded the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in a row. The novel is a stream of consciousness novel using interior monologue to express the protagonist’s inner feelings. To highlight its theme, McBride integrates conventional writing skills with the stream of consciousness skills in the novel.After an in-depth analysis of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the translator finds that, as a stream of consciousness novel, the whole story is narrated in scattered words. Interior monologues and free association prevail in the novel. In order to convey the exact spirits and emotions of the original work to readers, the translator adopts different translation strategies and methods according to different circumstances, such as conversion of parts of speech, amplification and omission of words, induction etc. In addition, considering the holistic feature of the whole text, the translator chose the Gestalt Aesthetics as the theoretical guidance, in an attempt to best mirror and capture what is in the source text.This report is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is a description of the translation practice, which includes the background of the translation project, a brief introduction to Eimear McBride and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the significance of the translation project as well as the structure of the whole report. Chapter two analyses the lexical, grammatical and discourse features of the source text. Chapter three introduces the translation process, which includes the preparation before translation, introduction to Gestalt Aesthetics, and schedule and revision after the translation. Chapter four analyzes the target text from the lexical and syntactical level under the guideline of the Gestalt Aesthetics, and discusses the problems the translator has met and the translation strategies adopted during the translation. The last chapter summarizes the lessons the translator have learned during the translation.