A Translation Report On The Juliuhe River (Excerpts)

In the history of translation,translators had long played marginalized roles.It was not until the “Pragmatic Turn” in the 1970 s and the “Cultural Turn” in the 1990 s in the Western translation studies that the concept of “translator’s subjectivity” was put forward and gradually developed.After George Steiner’s proposition of the Fourfold Translation Motion Theory(i.e.“trust”,“aggression”,“import” and “compensation”)in his book After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation,the position of translators,as the intermediary of the source language and the target language,has become more and more important.This translation report argues that translator’s subjectivity penetrates through every stage of translation,playing a decisive role in the accomplishment of the quality of translation.This view is nicely manifested in the translated excerpts of The Juliuhe River.Qi Bangyuan started to write The Juliuhe River in her eighties and it took her 4 years to complete this work.The book tells the migration of those people from the watershed of the Juliuhe River in Northeast China to the coast of the Yakouhai Sea in Taiwan.It shows the upheaval of early modern China,the tribulation of Chinese people,the Chinese intellectuals’ concern over the fate of the nation,and the courage of Chinese women to break through the shackles of the old conventions.The Juliuhe River has high literary value and is worthy of translating.The second chapter contains a detailed account of stories about the author’s family,along with the teachers and students of Zhongshan High School of Northeast,retreating arduously and desperately from the north to the south.July 7th,2017 marks the 80 th anniversary of the outbreak of Chinese people’s eight-year war of resistance against Japanese aggression;choosing this chapter is out of “trust” towards its historic interest.On the basis of understanding the original text,the translator “aggresses” upon its structure boldly,achieving the fluency of the translated text with methods like supplement and omission.During the process of “import”,the translator adopts the domestication strategy and tries to meet target language readers’ cultural and writing habits.The features of the original text are inevitably lost in the first three steps,thus “compensation” to characters’ personalities and the author’s style are very significant.This translation report concludes that if translators can strike a balance between subjectivity and fidelity,they can produce more and better works.