A Translation Report On I Was Here

I Was Here is the latest one of many novels by Gayle Forman,an American young novelist.This novel is actually a book of reflections.By virtue of the characters and events in the story,Gayle Forman intends to reveal a popular social issue of committing suicides,explore the relevant reasons,and uncover the mental state of the heroine before her suicide.The present report is a summary of resolving the major problems in the translation of the first part of the novel.The source text for translation consists of the first four chapters of the whole novel.In this novel,long and difficult English sentences are tough parts for translators in the practice of English-Chinese translation.These sentences mainly include three types:long and difficult ones,long but easy ones,and difficult but short ones.With regard to these sentences,Eugene Nida's functional equivalence theory is chosen as the theoretical guidance.Functioning as the great assessment criteria for the quality of translated versions,Nida's(1993)theoretical guidance covers three aspects,namely equivalence in information,style and idiomaticity.Under the above theoretical guidance,the translator has managed to translate the long and difficult sentences in her translation by adopting the following translation techniques.Firstly,as for the equivalence in information,the translator has applied two translating methods,respectively the division of sentence members and literal translation methods to handle the versions of long sentences which are difficult or easy to understand.Secondly,in order to achieve the equivalence in style,the translator employed free translation,omission and addition to deal with the versions of some short and difficult sentences.Sometimes,short sentences are not easy to translate and translators may know its meaning but he or she may not make a great expression.Finally,word formation was applied in translation to reach the equivalence in idiomaticity.Because of differences between English and Chinese,these two languages require different expressions.In order to get great version,idiomaticity is quite important for that.In this translation report,the translator has focused on the translation of long and difficult English sentences in the original text from the perspective of functional equivalence.Some implications have been obtained during the translation process.On the one hand,the translator needs to grasp three key points of "the closest","natural" and "equivalent" language according to the functional equivalence theory.On the other hand,the concrete translation methods such as the division of sentence members,literal translation,free translation,omission and addition,word formation are quite important during the understanding and translation of the original text.To make excellent translation versions,all the translators should know a lot and fully understand the characteristics of the source text and the target readers.And finally they need to apply the very appropriate translation strategies in the translation process to ensure that messages can be conveyed in the closest natural equivalent way.