A Practice Report On The Translation Of The Returned

With a number of hot mystery movies and television plays in recent years, mystery novels have increasingly become popular among Chinese readers, and have not yet received their equivalent status under the umbrella of popular fiction. The attractiveness of Chinese mystery novels appears to be rather low, whereas the translation quality of foreign mystery novels is still substantial room for improvement and research on the translation of them is not deep enough. Therefore, more emphasis should be paid to the translation of mystery novels. In this report, the translator will give some ideas on the translation of foreign mystery novels by the practice of translating The Returned.Mystery novels, as its name implies, attach great importance to the creation of mysterious atmosphere to attract readers'interest. Compared with other literature works, the use of environment description, psychological description and sound effect plays an important role in the creation of mysterious atmosphere. How can a mystery novel achieve its equivalent effect when it is translated into other languages while remaining the same effect? Translation shifts might be a key to sort out such problem.As far as translation shift is concerned, many Western translation scholars have done a lot of research. One remarkable and influential theorist is Catford, whose books on translation theories, in particular, chapters on translation shift, are introduced into China and quoted a lot in the publication of related Chinese papers and books. In other words, Catford's translation theory has been widely accepted by the academia in China. Hence, this report, based on the features of mystery novels, tries to employ Catford's shift model to examine the translation shifts existing on and below the level of sentence in the translation process of Chapters 18 and 19 of The Returned, including level shifts, structure-shifts, class-shifts and unit-shifts.Through the practice, the author found that different translation shifts reproduce different levels of "equivalence", and create atmosphere and render reader's response to varying degrees. In the process, the translator should pay attention to the shifts between source language and target language and respect the original work by remaining the suspense effect. Meanwhile she should be sensitive to the response of the target readers.