Translation Of Appearance Description In Biographical Novels

This is a translation practice report based on the English to Chinese translation of Lust for Life:The Classical Biographical Novel of Vincent Van Gogh(Book One).The book is a biographical novel by Irving Stone which presents Van Gogh's miserable and enthusiastic short life and is in great popularity among English readers.In order to extend the readership in China and introduce the great post-impressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh,I decided to translate this book into Chinese.Based on my own translation,I made a detailed analysis of the translation process and the translation methods I adopted in this report.This report firstly analyzes the major stylistic features of the excerpts in Book One,and then clarifies the major difficulties I met in my translating the appearance description sentences in it.Finally I elaborate the translation methods I used to address these obstacles.The book is characterized with numerous long sentences of appearance description when portraying his characters with the purpose of conveying rich meanings.Some sentences are made up of several verbless clauses,some with non-finite clauses,while others with finite clauses,which makes the sentence structures quite complex.Such is the stylistic features of appearance description sentences in the book,and is also the main difficulties I met in my translation process.Specifically,the major difficulties I encountered in translating appearance description long sentences are as follows:first,it is difficult to keep balance between faithfulness in meaning and in style at the same time;second,it is difficult to restructure the original complex English sentences into acceptable Chinese sentences.In translating such long and complex English sentences,I followed Lin Yutang's translation principle of "Faithfulness,Expressiveness and Beauty" and adopted the following methods:First,for sentences with several verbless clauses,when it is too long,division is adopted to cater for the Chinese sentence patterns;whereas if there are several short verbless clauses in one sentence,and if they are connected by connotative meaning or logic,I would use combination.Second,in translating sentences with non-finite clauses,if the clause is a present participle one used as a modifier,I use sequential translation;but if the clause is a past participle one with passive meaning,adaptation is employed to change the past participle clause into a Chinese active sentence.Finally,in translating sentences with finite clauses in it,literal translation is used if the original sentence structures and ideological contents are practically the same as that of the target language;but if the linguistic structures are different between the two languages,freetranslation has to be employed.Whichever method adopted serves only one purpose,that is,to try to produce an"expressive" or even "beautiful" translation on the basis of "faithfulness" to the original text,for only in this way,can the translation satisfy the Chinese readers' expectations towards a biographical novel.