A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of Family Business (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Translator's Subjectivity

With the development of modern society,"globalization" is not only a word to,describe the tendency of economic development,but also a word to show the trend of cultural evolution.To be an essential component of culture,literary works are picturesque textbooks for people to follow the trend.People can get rich knowledge and information such as economic situation,production relations,local customs and psychological situations of a certain society from the vivid and specific description on the story provided by literary works.Irish culture inherits a lot from Celt culture,and Gaelic interacts with English.As a result,Irish English is formed with a unique grammatical system and style.Therefore,the expressions,dialects and proverbs of Irish English are highly distinguished from those of the standard English.The novel Family Business,written by Irish writer Muriel Bolger,is selected as the material of the translation practice.It tells about a story that the heroine named Anne finally found out what she really wanted and how to fulfill her dream with the help of her families and lover.The novel is filled with dialogues,and the personalities,emotions and psychology of the characters are implied in their language so that the dialogue translation from English to Chinese is the most essential for the success of the Chinese version of this novel.As we all know,the Twords in dialogues are very colloquial and some words are hardly understood only from their literal meanings.Therefore,under the guidance of translator's subjectivity,it is necessary to focus on the lexical translation of the novel.This report analyzes the translation of some special words from the perspective of their relations to context,images of characters and cultural backgrounds.As a result,readers can not only understand the meaning of source text but also follow the feelings and psychological situations of the characters.In the process of translation,some special skills of translation are applied:1)sentence reconstruction so as to make the translation better conform to the expression habits of Chinese;2)using amplification to add some necessary words,phrases and even clauses to make the translation more fluent;3)extending the semantic meanings of some words and phrases.When the lexical definition of a word can not convey the deep meaning,it will be translated after taking a full consideration of specific context.Through this translation practice,it is concluded that firstly,it is necessary tor translators to give full play to their subjectivity to understand the source text accurately by taking full consideration of various factors;secondly,the differences between Chinese and English could not be ignored.On the contrary,they should be fully illustrated so as to show the style of the source text.