A Report On The Translation Of Whistling Past The Graveyard:Chapters 8-11

This report is based on the translation of chapters 8-11 of the English novel Whistling Past the Graveyard.The novel is set in America of the 1960 s when black people lived in poor conditions and when discrimination and racial segregation still prevailed.It is expected that the target language readers can fully understand the novel through the translation.The novel Whistling Past the Graveyard mainly tells of the life story of a nine-year-old white girl Starla and a black woman Eula.After experiencing a series of twists and turns,they start a journey to Nashville with unexpected dangers lurking ahead.As for the excerpt for this translation practice,it presents what has happened to Starla and Eula and forced them to leave home for a journey,and also depicts Starla and Eula in the first days when they begin their long journey.During the process,Starla's view of the world and society changes gradually.Novel translation is common but not easy.Different from news report,legal and other texts that have well-organized structures,monotonous sentences,formal style and language and precise grammar,novels are more complicated and varied in sentence structure and more casual in grammar and diction.Besides,intricate relationships and various emotions can often be found in novels,and the target text should also embody these traits.Moreover,the two languages involved are greatly different in vocabulary,sentence structure and grammar,especially when they come from different language families.All these factors pose problems for translation to some extent.It is almost impossible to reach absolute equivalence in message conveying between the source language and the target language.What a translator can do is to make the target text have the same effect on the target language readers as the source text does on its readers.Hence,in this report,Nida's theory of functional equivalence is applied to analyze how the translator manages to reach the relative functional equivalence between the English original and the Chinese translation.In this report,some distinctive linguistic features appearing in the translation are selected to serve as the objects of case study.Armed with Nida's theory,the report elaborates on how functional equivalence is achieved in the rendition of some complicated structures.These include the following: translation of the title,translation of polysemous words,translation of long sentences,and translation of dialogues.Through analyses,the conclusion is drawn as follows: appropriate adjustments are of essential importance to make the translation adequately equivalent to the source text in terms of content,expression of emotions,etc.