Translating Children's Literature In Light Of Chesterman's Theory Of Translation Norms

This report is based on a translation project of a children's literary work—Greyfriars Bobby.Of the twelve chapters in this book written by American writer Eleanor Atkinson,the first three were assigned to the author to translate.The translation process comprises three parts,i.e.pre-translation stage,translation stage and post-translation stage,during which Chesterman's theory of translation norms was used to guide the author's translation behaviors from three aspects—syntactic/grammar level,semantic level and pragmatic level— so as to meet the target readers' expectations.Moreover,the special cognitive abilities of the target audience were also taken into consideration when translating.This report mainly discussed theory guidance,comprehension obstacles and translation techniques.After reading the source text,the author looked up many papers about translating children's literature and formed a basic concept about how to deal with this project.Comprehension obstacles of this project could be generally divided into two categories: language obstacles and culture-related ones.Specifically,language obstacles include Scottish dialect,sentence structure as well as meticulous descriptions about the environment and the inner activities of the protagonists,while the culture-related obstacles mainly fall on those culture-loaded words or phrases.To deal with these obstacles,translation techniques like transposition,unit shift,paraphrase,structure change,hyponymy,abstraction change,trope change,cultural filtering,explicitness change and coherence change at syntactic,semantic and pragmatic levels were properly used during the translation.The author gained valuable experience from this translation project and one of the most important one is to translate under the guidance of theory and to pay attention the target readers' expectancy.It is hoped that this report could not only improve his translation skills and abilities,but also provide experience and implications for translators who engage in translating children's literature in the future.