A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of Ratner's Star(Excerpts) Based On Rewriting Theory

Don DeLillo is one of the most famous writers in contemporary America and he has won a number of local and international awards for literature.One of his novel's important features is to closely relate to the American society.In this translation practice,the author chose parts of his science fiction Ratner's Star to translate.Actually,science fiction is a kind of literary style produced with the rapid development of modern science and technology.And its contents are reasonable imaginations rather than delusions.However,the novel Ratner's Star is not restricted by the genre of science fiction,in the strict sense,Ratner's Star is not a science fiction novel but a postmodern science fiction simply disguised with features of science fiction.In Ratner's Star Don DeLillo just used the framework of science fiction to express his criticism of the society and politics.The science fiction Ratner's Star mainly tells us that a research team made up of many Nobel Prize winners is trying to decipher mysterious signals from outer space.Then the author excerpted part contents from Ratner's Star and in the excerpts the story is that one of characters comes to the underground laboratory and knows relevant people and some background information about the project.Later,in the process of translation,the author found that DeLillo used many sexual descriptions to reflect the character's personalities.Actually,sex is a sensitive topic,so translators must be cautious about translating sexual descriptions in works of literature.Therefore,by reading many parallel texts such as Lady Chatterley's Lover,the author used André Lefevere's rewriting theory to guide the translation of sexual descriptions.Lefevere's rewriting theory made people study translation in the cultural level.As a cross-language and cross-cultural communicative activity,translation is not only themechanical transformation from the source language to the target language,in fact,the translation activity is restricted by social and cultural factors.In regard to the rewriting theory,André Lefevere thought that all rewritings would reflect a certain ideology and a poetics.And ideology plays a very important role in selecting the theme of the original text and handling details;poetics also plays a crucial role in adopting translation strategies and determining the word choice and language style.Through rewriting,the author tries to make the translation in line with the ideology and poetics of the target readers.