A Translation Project Report Of The Last Titan:A Life Of Theodore Dreiser (First Chapter)

This is a project report on the translation of the first chapter Hoosier Hard Times of The Last Titan A Life of Theodore Dreiser,an biography of Theodore Dreiser,written by Jerome Loving.This chapter mainly describes the growing experiences of Theodore Dreiser,and influence of which on his later creation and writing style.Dreiser is a pioneer of American modern novels,the translation of this book will provide readers a better understanding of Dreiser and his works.Difficulties in this translation lie in the fact that many characters in Dresier's books are involved in the source text,and reasons of creating them and their prototypes in real life are presented,which requires a heavy workload of thoroughly reading the books of Dresier.Moreover,many Catholic terms are involved,thus the author has to look up various related material in order to gain a full comprehension of the background.The author applies Nida's theory of functional equivalence to solving the problems in the translation from perspectives of word equivalence,sentence equivalence,and paragraphe equivalence.And many translation strategies,such as splitting,conversion,amplification etc.are used in specific examples.The author realized in the process of translation that translation is a careful yet complicated work which requires good command of bilingual language.Calmness and patience,together with relavant theoretical knowledge are indispensable to solve difficulties in translation.