A Translation Report On English Chick-lit Spellbound

This is a report on the translation process,choices of translation strategies and their underlying multi-dimensional factors of the British Chick-Lit Spellbound(the first five chapters).Chick-Lit is a special literary genre of which both the writers and readers are young women.Since 1990 s,Chick-Lit works have swept around the world.Spellbound,which was written by Jane Green,a British female writer,is one of their representatives,which is chosen as the source text of the present translation project.The theoretical basis of the present translation practice is Polysystem Theory initiated by Evan-Zohar et al,the main points of which can be summarized as follows:(1)the social semiotics such as language,literature,politics,economy and ideology can be viewed as dynamic network systems which are each independent and interdependent at the same time,and which are integrated into a large polyculture system operating as a whole;(2)viewed from the perspective of Polysystem Theory,the status and value of literary or translation texts depend not only on the text types and their features,but also on extraliterary factors from the polyculture system such as social and economic status,culture and ideology,the objective of text creation and translation,the type of target readers,etc.;(3)literature also presents itself as a polysystem,which has “canonical” and “non-canonical”(or “heterogeneous”)members,of which the typical representatives are respectively classical poetry and Chick-Lit;(4)“adequacy” and “acceptability” are two opposite objectives and orientations of literary translation,respectively taking the literary norms of the source and target language as the objectives of translation,and oriented respectively to the source-text author and target-text readers.Interpreted from the perspective of Polysystem Theory,what underlies the strategic choices of Spellbound translation involves the factors from both the literary and extraliterary systems.The factors from literary system mainly include the genre,subject and content,and language style of the source text:(1)as for the genre,Spellbound belongs to Chick-Lit and is embodied with all the characteristics of Chick-Lit;(2)as for the subject and content,the young lady Alice's career and marriage life are set as the main line of Spellbound,which covers almost all aspects of British modern urban women's life;(3)as for the language style,Spellbound is lively in language expression and humorous in meaning,featuring fashion elements and narrative tension,which can cater to modern women's psychological needs for pursuit of fashion and happiness.The factors from extraliterary systems also influence the strategic choices of Spellbound translation,which mainly include the cultural background,social environment and group of readers:(1)as for the cultural background,the fast-food culture,leisure culture and fashion culture are currently popular among Chinese common people and Chick-Lit translation works,which could satisfy all these cultural trends,will necessarily become the spiritual “food” welcomed by these people;(2)as for the social environment,the present-day Chinese society has become more inclusive of diverse ideologies and values and Chick-Lit translation works,which advocate the “petty bourgeoisie” life style and experience of urban career women,have naturally become the life guidebooks of some young women;(3)as for the group of readers,Chick-Lit translation is mainly targeted at the 20-30 years old urban career women,who wish to find themselves in the works and learn some secrets of improving their life quality.Influenced by the above mentioned multi-dimensional factors from literary and extraliterary systems,in the present case of Spellbound translation,foreignization is chosen as the principal strategy while domestication is chosen as the subsidiary one so as to faithfully reveal the heterogeneity of the source text of such a Chick-Lit work while giving consideration to the target readers' acceptability.Of the two,foreignization strategy is concretely implemented by the following techniques:(1)literal translation,which is adopted to reproduce the social customs,ideology and language styles of the source text;(2)literal translation plus annotation,which is adopted to fill the vacancy in the target culture;(3)transliteration,which is adopted to retain the exoticism in the source text;(4)transference,which is adopted to import cultural elements of the source text.Domestication strategy is concretely implemented by the following techniques:(1)addition,which includes subject supplement and translation of empty subject(it)with a notional subject to enhance the coherence of the target text;(2)reduction such as omission of discourse markers to highlight parataxis in sentence construction;(3)adaptation,which includes voice conversion and idiom replacement to get adapted to Chinese language conventions;(4)division such as splitting long sentences into shorter ones to get adapted to Chinese grammatical norms.