A Report On E-C Translation Of Eight Men(Excerpt)

African-American literature is an inseparable part of American literature.As one of the representative writers,Richard Wright has a far-reaching influence on American literature and most of his works concern racial themes.E-C translation of anthology Eight Men is a subproject of E-C translation of Richard Wright's works.The author's supervisor Professor Bo Zhenjie is in charge of the whole project.As a member of the team,the author translates introduction and the first four stories.This report is completed on the basis of translation of The Man Who Lived Underground,the second story in Eight Men.The Man Who Lived Underground adopts perspective in third-person narration and tells a story about an African American,Fred Daniels,who was falsely accused and was finally killed.He was employed by a white woman,whose neighbor was murdered.He made a confession under torture.However,he ran away and hid in the sewers.Afterwards,he found the three policemen who had put him in the wrong and planned to bring them to the sewers.He wanted to testify his innocence by making them see what he saw and hear what he heard.Unfortunately,they finally took Fred's life in the manhole for fear that their misdoings were brought to light.The entrusting party sets three basic requirements:1)the translated text should be faithful to the original content;2)the translated text should be smooth and idiomatic;3)the terminologies should meet the general standard.Based on these three basic requirements,the author fulfilled the task under the guidance of "faithfulness and expressiveness" translation principle.To be specific,"faithfulness" means that the translated text is faithful to the original content while "expressiveness" implies that the translated text is smooth and idiomatic and its terminologies meet the general standard.To achieve "faithfulness",the translator should take the textual context into full consideration,choose the most appropriate semantic meaning,and employ translation methods and techniques so as to meet the first requirement of the entrusting party.To be specific,the translator should use literal and liberal translation at lexical level;make use of restructuring at syntactic level;employ addition,lexical conversion and restructuring at rhetorical level;and use the regular script in Chinese to replace italics and employ bold-face Chinese characters to substitute capitalizations at stylistic level.To achieve "expressiveness",the translator should employ translation methods and techniques on the basis of Chinese expressions so as to meet the second and third requirements of the entrusting party.Specifically,the translator should take advantage of transliteration,literal translation,liberal translation,addition,omission,repetition and restructuring at lexical level;employ restructuring and parallelism at syntactic level;translate rhyme with rhjme at rhetorical level;use the pronoun "qi",borrow legal terminologies and expressions in laws to represent the formal style and imitate the characters' way of speaking and use colloquialism to represent colloquial style at stylistic level.The author hopes that solutions of the problems in this report could provide a reference to African-American novel translation.Considering there is no Chinese version of The Man Who Lived Underground,so the author of the report hopes that this translated version could attract Chinese readers to learn more about Richard Wright,his works,and have a better understanding of the brutal and cruel racial discrimination in the United States.