Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of A Jest Of God Excerpt

A Jest of God is one of the most important novels written by Margaret Laurence.A Jest of God(1966)mainly tells the 34 year-old primary female teacher Rachel Cameron trapped in a milieu of deceit and pettiness of her own and that of others.However,few studies have been conducted of the novel and its Chinese translation,according to the author’s survey.This report undertakes the discussion of the novel with examples based on adaptation theory by Belgium linguist Verschuren.The core of this theory lies in the view that the use of language is a dynamic adaptation process.There are four angles of this theory,namely,contextual correlates of adaptability,structural objects of adaptability,dynamic of adaptability and salience of the adaptation process.This four angles takes linguistics,social and contextual factors into consideration.And the translation of novel mainly deals with those four factors.So this theory can be applied to the translation study of A Jest of God.Besides,the author utilizes translation strategies like division,conversion and so on to illustrate how to translate the original text at three levels,which include lexical,syntactic and supra-sentential levels.Under the guidance of this theory,the author explored how to make final choices during the process of translation,and found that adaptation theory is very useful in literary translation studies,and a fluent and faithful translation version can be rendered by utilizing this theory.