A Report On The Translation Of Pirates Of Venus (Excerpts)

This is a report on the translation of the science fiction Pirates of Venus,the first book in the Venus series written by Edgar Rice Burroughs.The book relates that the protagonist intends to visit Mars,but at last unexpectedly lands on the planet Venus,known as “Amtor” to its inhabitants.According to Professor Guo Jianzhong,literariness,scientificity and imagination are the three essential characteristics of science fiction.Among them,literariness is the first and foremost characteristic.Reading through the text,the translator finds that the literariness is richly embodied in its descriptions,narrations and dialogues.So how to cope with these three aspects to achieve literariness in the target text becomes a major challenge for the translator.Based on the analysis,for description translation,the translator adopts four-character idioms,amplification and the strategy of adjusting word order to present the mysterious scenery,the psychological activities or the personality of the character;for narration translation,the translator employs domestication to make targets readers easy to understand the plot;for dialogue translation,the translator takes into account the context and the character's identity to reproduce the character's image vividly and reveal the underlying meaning of the source text.Altogether this report comprises five chapters.The first chapter gives an introduction to the author,the book and the reasons for selecting the source text.The second chapter is about the preparation,schedule and proofreading.The third chapter is an analysis of the source text from the lexical,syntactic and textual perspectives.The fourth chapter gives a detailed description of the literariness of the source text and then discusses respective techniques with rich examples to achieve literary beauty in the target text.The fifth chapter is the conclusion of this report.