An Analysis Of The Translation Of The Sellout(Prologue And Chapter Ⅰ) From The Perspective Of Semantics

Based on my English-to-Chinese translation of Prologue and Chapter I of The Sellout,the thesis deals with the problems in the understanding and proper expression of four types of meaning including social meaning,affective meaning,collocative meaning and conceptual meaning according to Geoffrey Neil Leech’s seven types of meaning,and then puts forward some tentative translation strategies.The thesis summarizes some translation problems,collects examples,and explores translation strategies in the perspective of Leech’s four types of meaning.For the social meaning,in order to reflect the styles of the original based on the tradition of target language culture,some English foul words are translated in the way of free translation,contents related to sex are rendered as euphemisms,and some dialectal words are translated with the method of annotation.For the affective meaning,some English words or sentences full of emotions are expressed in an implicit way,thus I have to resort to the explicitation strategy to make the emotions shown in the original more explicit especially with the help of Chinese foul words.For the collocative meaning,there are many words of different meanings,and I will determine which semantic meaning the word actually has in the context.For the conceptual meaning,it is feasible to translate it into another language in theory,but an equivalent effect usually cannot be achieved in this way because of cultural-specific items.The cultural-specific items in source text fall into four categories:the material culture,language culture,religious culture and social culture.I add annotations in the text or out of the text to fill the gaps in culture and background information,and I also apply parody translation in accordance with specific conditions.