Study On The Reproduction Of Context In Letter Translation

This translation practice report is based on the practice project of Letters to Franca.Letters to Franca is a collection of letters between the famous French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and his lover Franca Madonia,an Italian philosopher.Althusser is considered as the founder of structural Marxism and has a worldwide influence in the field of Marxist philosophy.In recent years,Althusser's works have been continuously introduced into China.However,the quantity still remains modest,falling behind the increasing attention to Althusser in the domestic academia.Letters,which are the carrier of emotional communication and information transmission,feature real contents and abundant emotions and act as precious historical data for studying the communication parties and the time they lived in.As far as this translation practice is concerned,most of the letters in the book were written by Althusser to Madonia with only a few replies from Madonia,which to some extent leads to a loss of context;on the other hand,due to the large number of letters,wide range of contents and heave of emotional changes,how to complement the missing context and reproduce the original context becomes the focus of this practice.The author analyzes the translation from the perspective of the three levels of context proposed by the anthropologist Malinowski,namely linguistic context,situational context and cultural context.This translation practice report consists of four chapters.The first chapter introduces the source of the translation project,the author's life and his academic achievements,sketches the content of the text,discusses the classification,characteristics and research value of letters in combination with the text type of letter collections and finally puts forward on the basis of text analysis that context reproduction is the focus of the translation.The second chapter describes the process of translation.With project management models introduced,this chapter also discusses its feasibility in cooperative translation and its guiding role in practice.Translation process is divided into three steps:pre-translation preparation,translating process and post-translation matters.The author prepares for the translation on three levels:glossaries,discourses and background knowledge reserve.Then the author advances step by step according to the schedule while attaching great importance to quality control and information exchange among translators at the same time.After completing the preliminary draft,the author conducts self-review and manuscript compilation and solicits review from other project members.The third chapter is a case study of the translation,which analyzes the typical cases in the translation practice on the three levels of contexts.In linguistic contexts,it is pointed out with specific examples that the meaning of "context" is not only limited to the context of a word or sentence,but also can rise to the level of discourse and text.In situational contexts,the translation strategies for fictional scenarios and emotional scenarios are studied.In cultural contexts,cultural differences inevitably put a crime into readers' understanding of the original text.And the author tries to strike a balance between foreignization and domestication with her own understanding.The fourth chapter is a summary of the translation practice,i.e.the author's reflection upon the defects of it.As regards the work of the author,there are some problems such as limited grasp of the Chinese and French languages and insufficient pre-translation preparation.In terms of cooperation,there is still room for improvement,particularly on information communication and schedule design.Generally speaking,the characteristics of letter translation and the experience of cooperative translation provide new ideas and methods for future translation work.