A Report On The E-C Translation Of A Daughter Of The Middle Border (Excerpts)

A Daughter of the Middle Border,written by the American writer Hamlin Garland from the West and finished in 1921,is a biography which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.The book has related the growth of the author in the American Midwest and the development of it.Other than that,the conflicts between the Native Americans and the whites have also been portrayed in this work during the period from the end of Civil War to the outbreak of the World War I,showing great value for people to study and explore the history of Indians and the Midwest in that time.As a biographical work,the book,A Daughter of the Middle Border,possesses both authenticity and literariness.During the process of translation,I found that the explorations to Indian reservations of the author are depicted for several times which have presented factual accounts of the Indians' life.A great deal of proper nouns,especially the names of Indian people and culture-loaded words concerned with the Indian tribes,have emerged,representing the authenticity of this book.Due to the differences in the pronunciations between English and Chinese and in their cultures,some barriers are entailed for translation.Moreover,with many characters and scenery depicted meticulously by using of rhetoric which enriches the language,the work is full of literariness.Even though English and Chinese share lots of similarities in the employment of rhetoric,the rhetoric still brings difficulties for the translation of this book because the two languages belong to different language families after all and are different in handling it.Because there are many proper nouns and rhetoric in the fourth and twelfth chapters of this book,and it is more challenging when translating,I decided to select the translation of these two chapters for case analyzing.Transliteration,literal translation with annotation and free translation were adopted when dealing with proper nouns in order to convey the exact meanings and ideas of the original texts.As regards rhetoric,two methods,namely retention translation and adaptation translation,were applied,helping to keep faithful to the original style and meanings and to get the language of the translated version enriched.In the last part,the limitations of this report are to be pointed out.