A Report On The Translation Of An Excerpt Of The Underground Railroad

Though hundreds of years have elapsed since Abraham Lincoln issued The Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and afterwards led the Union towards the victory of American Civil War,officially ending the miserable life of generations of black slaves,excellent novels keep coming out which draw on this darkest pre-Civil War period.They not only possess high levels of literary value,but also are eternal reminders of the profound inequity imposed on African Americans.Among them,The Underground Railroad,the latest book published by Colson Whitehead in 2016,stands out with its unique diction,vividly constructed situations and sophisticated sentences.Despite the tons of compliments which he received as a novelist during the last two decades,Colson Whitehead is still unfamiliar to many Chinese literature enthusiasts.Therefore,the translator decides that there will be a high demand for a Chinese version of this extraordinary English novel,which will arouse people's interest in his other novels.Based on a conscientious source text analysis,the translator chooses to carry out this translation through explicitation,which,as a universal feature in translation,results in a substantial increase of explicitness in the target text as compared to the source text.This translation report is based on the translator's translation of the first part of The Underground Railroad:A Novel.After analyzing the translation material,the translator finds that abstract,culture-loaded and juxtaposed words are abundant in this book.Besides,the novel is intertwined with both short structures,complicated long sentences and terse dialogues with no apparent cohesive device,thus increasing the difficulty of understanding on both lexical and syntactic levels.The Chinese readers are bound to be baffled when going through the translated version if it were not for explicitation.Accordingly,during the translation process,the translator uses translation strategies like specification,addition of footnotes and utilization of four-character Chinese expressions to deal with lexical difficulties,while she adds connectives,restructures original sentences and repeats previous information to make the translation more accessible to the audience syntactically.This report wraps up the difficulties encountered in translation process and the solutions to them.It not only provides useful information for the translation of Colson Whitehead's other novels,but also is of value to the research on the practical application of explicitation.