The E-C Translation Report On The Style Of H Is For Hawk(Excerpts)

The report is about H Is for Hawk,a memoir written by English naturalist Helen MacDonald.As a type of biography literature,this memoir is rich in literature features,and depicts a story in details about the author rekindling the hope for life by training a goshawk named Mabel.The translator chooses chapter 21 to chapter 24 to do the practice,and it’s where the book reaches the climax: Helen found herself strongly connected with Mabel,and things got quite complicated.Apart from the intense storyline,the book has a great influence on our society.First,it was already on the best-seller list within two weeks after being published by Jonathan Cape,a famous London publishing house.Also,the book helped the author win several prizes including Samuel Johnson Prize.The report is focused on solving translation difficulties created by the style of the text at lexical and syntactical levels.At the lexical level,letter signals,descriptive verbs and adjectives are vivid and expressive,but it is hard to find their equivalence in Chinese;therefore,the translator adopted literal translation and free translation to represent the figurativeness of these words.At the syntactical level,complicated sentence structures are used to express centralized and condensed information,and contain complicated structural or semantic relations.The author used translation methods such as “splitting”,“change of voice”,“information regrouping”,aiming to convey the information as much as she can,and to accord with the habits of expression in Chinese.During this practice,the translator realized that there is a strong connection between the style of literary texts and lexis & syntax;therefore,she intentionally used some translation strategies and methods to represent the style.Also,she now understands the importance of widening the scope of knowledge,and is determined to improve her ability in the future.