Restructuring Sentences From Perspective Of Constructivist Translatology

This thesis is a report on the translation of the first three chapters?Alice in Dairyland,Damage and Honors?of The Alice Stories.It is written by Jesse Lee Kercheval,who is a poet,translator and fiction writer.She is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.She is also the author of numerous books,notably Building Fiction,The Museum of Happiness,and The Dogeater.The Alice Stories is about a girl named Alice and her family.She falls in love with Anders Dahl,a Norwegian farmer and they get married.Soon,their child Maude was born.This novel tells the tale of a family: the pain of loss and the importance of the love of friends and family in the midst of turmoil.It is about three generations which forms a tender and poetic chronicle of a woman's journey through time,love,motherhood.Filled with rich humor and a deep understanding of human character,this novel consists of descriptions and dialogues.During the whole translation process,taking coherence,logic and expression preference of Chinese into consideration,the translator finds that many sentences in the source text have to be rearranged and reproduced into target language.So this translation will focus on restructuring sentences in the process of translation.According to Liu Miqing and other scholars,there are several strategies in translating English long sentences into Chinese,such as pre-embedding,cutting,and splitting,combing sentences,reversing and so on.Strategies of restructuring sentences,however,applied most frequently in the translator's translation practice and discussed in this translation report include: pre-embedding,cutting,and splitting.In Constructivist Translatology,translation is regarded as a restructuring process in which a translator uses another language to present the result which has been described by the original author in the source language.Therefore,all of these strategies are applied in the light of Constructivist Translatology,which was put forward by Professor Lü Jun in the earlier 21^th century.According to this translation theory,a good translation should follow three principles during the process of translation: 1)to obey objectivity of knowledge;2)to follow rationality of comprehension and general acceptability;3)to conform to directionality of the source text.In this translation report,strategies concerning translating long sentences most frequently used in this translation practice are introduced and explained with examples.Then the translator draws a conclusion that pre-embedding,cutting and splitting have their own advantages.Pre-embedding helps a lot in translating attributives,but when there are too many attributives in a long sentence,the translator may turn to the strategy of cutting.Splitting is another useful strategy to split some words,phrases and expressions off the sentence,which offers the translator a flexible way to translating long sentences.These strategies can be used separately,and sometimes can be altogether applied when needed to deliver a good translation.