A Translation Report Of Boy,Snow,Bird

This is a translation report.The text translated is a British best-selling author Helen Oyeyemi's Boy,Snow,Bird.In this thesis,the translator translates the 3-5 chapters of the first part.The novel reflects a racial problem that African Americans with light skin passing from black to white.The framework of the novel is as following:In the winter of 1953,Boy Novak arrives in a small town in Massachusetts in order to look another kind of life.She gets married to a native named Arturo Whitman,who is a widower,and becomes stepmother to his lovely daughter,Snow Whitman.Later,their daughter Bird was born,who is a dark-skin child.This incident revealed a secret that the Whitman family had hidden for three generations,namely,they are descendants of white-passing African-Americans from Louisiana.In this translation report I will talk about how I translate the original text and analyze the difficulties I come across in the process of translation and put forward translation strategies.Difficulties in translation are mainly in two levels,the word level and the sentence level.The word level includes the translation of proper nouns,polysemy,part of speech and culture-loaded words.In the sentence level,the translator will mainly analyze the difficulties in adverbial clauses,attributive clauses,passive sentences and complex sentences.Then,the translator will talk about some solutions and strategies according to these translation difficulties and analyze these strategies by combining examples in the translation text.In the word level,the translator mainly uses the method of transliteration and literal translation in translating proper nouns.When translating words with multiple meanings,I select the appropriate meaning according to the context.Sometimes,I even need to extend the word meaning when there is no appropriate corresponding Chinese word.Some words have more than one part of speech.So when translating these kinds of words,I usually have to change the part of speech in order to be in line with the Chinese expression.There are also many culture-loaded words in this translation practice,which are hard to understand for target text readers because of the cultural gap.Generally,I would add annotation to explain the connotation of these culture-loaded words.In the sentence level,translation difficulties mainly fall on the translation of adverbial clauses,attributive clauses,passive sentences and complex sentences.In order to achieve ideal translation,I usually need to combine several translation strategies in translating these sentences.Through the translation I have learned that my translation ability is far from satisfaction,so I need to enrich my knowledge,broaden my horizon and improve my writing ability urgently.