A Translation Report On My Family And Other Animals (Chapters 1-2)

This is the translation practice of the famous British autobiography novel 'My Family and Other Animals', which covers the first two chapters of the novel.The author of this autobiographic novel is the famous British naturalist Gerald Durrell. The novel tells of the years that the author lived as a child with his siblings and widowed mother on the Greek island of Corfu between 1935 and 1939. Due to the gloomy weather in London, every family member feels miserable, so the whole family move to the sunshine country in Greece called Corfu Island, where there are a variety of interesting insights and conflicts with various animals. It is the experience that allows the author be enlightened and eventually become a famous zoologist.The reason why the first two chapters of this novel were chosen as the translation practice report, on one hand is that the first two chapters are the cornerstone of the whole story,which is more conducive to the understanding of the whole work. On the other hand,the first two chapters involve a large number of detailed descriptions of landscapes,both the boring weather in London and the sunshine of Corfu. The author describes the landscapes in a meticulous and vivid way, which greatly increased the difficulty of translation. In addition, it also contains a large number of dialogues of characters. So how to translate these properly is also a huge challenge. In writing aspect,the author describes the life of the Durrell family in a humorous manner and in a much exaggerated way to enlarge the shortcomings of the family members. Each character has its own distinctive feature, so the author enlarged the charm of each character for this point impressively. At the same time, the author has both amazing ability to observe and imagine. The vivid depiction of scenes and animals makes people can't help imagining and laughing,so this book also can be called 'The world's happiest childhood notes'. It is worthy pondering how to restore these language features as much as possible in the translation process. In addition to the language features, this report will also focus on some basic strategies of novel translation, such as title translation, literal translation and free translation, domestication and alienation.The report covers four parts. The first part is the task description, including the reasons and significance of choosing the topic, the author and the work introductions.The second part is the translation process description, including pre-translation preparation, translation phases and post-translation issues. The third part is the case analysis, which is the essence of this report, including the combination and comparison of translation strategies and the examples of difficult sentences in this book. The last part is about summarizing the translation practice including absorbing experience and learning lessons.Through this translation practice,the translator received a more profound understanding of novel translation, and from which the translator recognized the deficiencies. And the translator needs continuous practice to enhance English translation skills.