A Report On Translating Excerpts From Alice Adams

Doing literary translation can help translators study the differences between Chinese and English expressive pattern as well as improve the capability to understand and translate literary works.I choose to translate the novel Alice Adams written by American realism writer Booth Tarkington,who is famous for his wit of writing with irony and humor.Alice Adams is a satirical and realistic novel.In doing the translation,the major problems I need to solve include how to exactly translate the polysemous words under different contexts,how to correctly express the meaning of the conversational speech formulae and how to properly reproduce the unique linguistic and rhetorical style of the original text.This report is based on the translation of the first four chapters of Alice Adams and consists of five parts,namely task description,process description,introduction of translation theory and translation strategy,case analysis and conclusion.The first part introduces the theme of Tarkington's works,then elaborates the realistic significance of the novel Alice Adams,and analyzes the language features of the article(including detailed description of characters and environment,application of multiple rhetorical devices and use of unique dictions),finally explains the significance of the translation.The second part describes the translation process,including preparation for translation,translation of the source text as well as examination and revision of the translated text.Before translating,I analyze the novel through collecting relevant background information and repeatedly reading the article.When translating,under the guidance of Relevance-Theoretic Translation Theory,I figure out the author's communicative intentions,judge the contextual assumptions of the novel,and represent the contextual information of the original text in target language according to the principle of "optimal relevance".After finishing the first draft of translation,I keep examining and revising the translated text based on the principles of "faithfulness" and "expressiveness".The third part explores Gutt's Relevance-Theoretic Translation Theory.Based on Relevance Theory,Gutt regards translation as an "ostensive-inferential" cognitive process,proposes the translation principle of "optimal relevance",and emphasizes that the translated text should keep the same contextual effects with the original text.Meanwhile,I regard the."optimal.relevance" principle as the.guiding principle to.choose,translationstrategy.With the comparison between domestication and foreignization strategy,I use cases to explain the selection of translation strategies under different circumstances.The fourth part explains the application of Relevance-Theoretic Translation Theory to the understanding and the translation of polysemous words,conversational speech formulae,unique dictions and rhetorical devices.I surmise the author 's intentions according to the communicative clues of the article,understand the connotation of the source text,transform the information of the original language and finally use the interpretively similar expressions in Chinese to translate.The fifth part summarizes the main content of the report and explains the translation theory and the translation strategies adopted in translating the novel.