A Report On The Translation Of What I Was(Excerpt)

This translation material is selected from a novel named What I was by an American writer Meg Rosoff.It is a branch of young adult novels in American literature,which mainly describes a troublesome boy Hilary who wants to escape from boarding school friend with an orphan Finn.Despite the fragile friendship,they struggle to undergo numerous rumors and hardships and learn the truth of love and friendship at last.All the translation work was done by the author on her own.Literary translation emphasizes the importance of reproducing the content and style of the original work,which matches the core of functional equivalence theory that stresses the receptor's response.According to the functional equivalence theory,translation doesn't simply mean translate the source text word for word;instead,a perfect translation requires the translator to take the receptor's response into full consideration so as to provide the target readers with a good understanding and appreciation of the original work that similar to the original readers'.Therefore,this theory is of great help to guide this translation practice.This report focuses on dealing with the difficulties met in translation from three level,namely,lexical level,syntactic level and discourse level.By analyzing typical cases,proper translation skills such as addition and adaptation adopted in dialogue translation are chosen to reproduce the closest natural equivalence in the target language,making it be widely accepted by Chinese readers.