A Report On Chinese Translation Of The Road To Little Dribbling

This is a report on the translating of The Road to Little Dribbling,the latest bestseller of the renowned travel writer Bill Bryson.The book was published in 2015 and has been widely hailed for its humorous flavor and lucid style that has characterized Bryson's travelogues.The only available Chinese rendition of the book,published in the traditional Chinese characters by a Taiwan-based press,is rife with misinterpretations and fails to communicate the humor and beauty of the original.Therefore,the author of this report retranslates twenty chapters of the twenty-six-chapter travelogue and endeavors to explore means to retaining the original humor and beauty to the largest extent based on comparative analyses of both the published versions and her own versions.Humor in The Road to Little Dribbling mainly falls into two categories,i.e.rhetoric humor and non-rhetoric humor.The former could be further divided into ironic humor,hyperbolic humor and punny humor while the latter includes humorous ditties,unintentional phonetic humor caused by mishearing and intentional graphemic humor caused by misspelling and coinage.It is found that the crux of the translation of rhetoric humor is the retention of certain figure of speech.Besides,creative addition of rhetoric devices could be made to enhance humorous effect.The efficient communication of non-rhetorical humor lies in the dynamic predominance of formal equivalence and functional equivalence,with the latter prevails in most cases.The subjectivity of translator should be given full play and creative treason could be made for equal or similar humorous effect on the target readers.The multi-dimensional beauty of the descriptive sentences of Bryson's travel writings is appreciated and transferred from three levels.i.e.the logical level,the pictorial level and the emotional level.It is found that explicitation of hidden logic and addition of background information are key to the transfer of logical beauty;reasonable amplification and specification along with exploitation of the pictorial beauty of Chinese characters are pivotal to the transfer of pictorial beauty while retention of certain syntactic structures,proper use of modal particles and creative employment of personification are crucial to the transfer of emotional beauty.The author of this report hopes to provide some helpful reference to both the translation of humorous travelogue and its study through her translation practice.