The Effect Of Chinese Function Words In Dialogue Translation

Recent years have witnessed the fast-paced development of language service industry,and translation field is becoming increasingly broader and much more specific,with different translation strategies and translation criteria fit for different special fields and industries.Novels are classified as one of the four types of literature along with poetry,prose and plays.Not only can dialogues help shape the characters of a fiction,develop its plots,attract its readers but embody aesthetic beauty and writing styles of the novelist.Dialogues with a strong colloquial feature serve as a useful tool or efficient way to present readers with the personalities of the fictional characters in a novel.Thus,it can be said that dialogue translation plays a critical role in the overall translation of a novel.This report on English-Chinese translation of Night Dogs excerpted from The Alice Stories intends to study and analyze the translation methods employed in dialogues by investigating them.It seems to be of necessity to deal with the dialogues in the target text for representation of characters‘ personalities.In order to translate this collection of stories into a widely recognized Chinese version,the translator is required to take into account the education level,aesthetic demands and speaking style of the target readers.In translating the dialogues in Night Dogs,the translator comes to realize that it is of great necessity to utilize a great number of Chinese function words to indicate the morphological changes of English words,such as using adverbs of time or auxiliary words of tense in Chinese to denote the sequence of events.Besides,the translator also employs some modal adverbs and modal auxiliary words to convey the speakers‘ moods and their attitudes and interjections to show their true feelings so as to offer a more comfortable reading experience to Chinese readers.Based on the translator‘s in-depth reflection and analysis of the translation practice,this report puts forward related translation strategies and deliberates on the effect of Chinese function words in English-Chinese dialogue translation.Through description and analysis of the translated practice,the translator has drawn conclusions as follows: dialogue is an efficient way to shape characters,depict objective environment as well as help develop the plots in a novel.During the process of translating,the appropriate usage of Chinese function words makes fictional dialogues in the target text more consistent with the characters‘ personalities and more useful for developing the plot.Specifically speaking,the translation can help Chinese readers with deeper understanding of the characters‘ personalities and the relationship among the characters,thus making the characters more vivid.Last but not the least,it is hoped that this report could offer some references for the translators specialized in novel translation and that the translator could do his bit for the development of literature translation.