A Report On The Translation Of Foregrounding Features In The Translation Of Dog Medicine

This is a report on the translation of Dog Medicine: How My Dog Saved Me From Myself,which is written by Julie Barton,an American writer.The translator chooses the first 9 chapters of the book to translate.Based on the translation,the translator identifies and distinguishes the foregrounding features of the source text and,with some typical cases,analyzes the features with references to Halliday's explanation of foregrounding,exploring the translation strategies of foregrounding features in the memoir.Dog Medicine: How My Dog Saved Me From Myself is Julie Barton's memoir,telling the author's real experiences of having depression and recovering from that mental illness through her comfort dog and relevant therapy.In this memoir,the author tells her psychological journey in first person.In order to fully understand the author's intention,the translator carefully studies the source text,and finds that the author uses the foregrounding to highlights her inner thoughts.In literature,authors would use foregrounding so as to make language distinguished and call readers' attention.But new expressions are not necessarily foregrounding features.Only “motivated” prominence can be called foregrounding and have some meaning in artistic style.Therefore,the translator has to differentiate which kind of expression is deliberately used and which kind is “automatically” used by the author.Only in this way can the translator appropriately reproduce the foregrounding features in target text.In this report,the translator empirically analyzes the foregrounding features of the source text at the level of graphology,syntactics and rhetoric,and discusses the translation strategies of foregrounding features.In the translator's view,translators should try their best to reproduce the foregrounding features and preserve the original aesthetics.However,because of the differences between Chinese and English,translators sometimes have to make adjustment in the target text,giving up the expression way but still and reproducing the expressive effect of the source text.And even sometimes translators has to give up the whole originality of the source text,because otherwise the target text would be incoherent and affect readers' acceptability.The translator really hopes that this report could provide some useful information as references for future learners who study the memoir translation.