C-E Translation Report Of The Great Reclamation(Excerpt):Difficulties Of And Methods For Translating Fictional Dialogues

The C-E Translation Project of The Great Reclamation is a simulated translation project based on the first chapter of the fiction The Great Reclamation written by Yu Liangbo.Set in Xiaojin County in 1970s,the book tells a story about the reclamation activities led by Wang Axing and introduces the hardworking and unremitting spirit of reclamation.The language in the book is plain and simple and there are a lot of dialogues.The project aims to improve the author's application ability of translation theories and translation skills.Due to cultural and linguistic differences between Chinese and English,culture-loaded expressions and ellipsis in dialogues are difficult to translate.Culture-loaded expressions are difficult to translate because 1)culture-loaded expressions have verbal English counterparts with different connotations;2)culture-loaded expressions have no verbal English counterparts.Ellipsis is difficult to translate because the Chinese forms 1)pronoun plus ellipsis and 2)other words plus ellipsis may function differently from their verbal English counterparts.Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory points out that translation is "a process to represent the original message in both semantic and literary form by the closest and the most natural language" and the target readers should be ensured to obtain the same reading experience as the source-text readers do.Under the guidance of this theory,different translation methods are adopted under different circumstances.In translating culture-loaded expressions with verbal English counterparts of different connotations,idiomatic translation and free translation are employed.For culture-loaded expressions without English counterparts,free translation plus annotation and free translation plus colloquial expressions are utilized.For pronoun plus ellipsis,adding an interjection and free translation are adopted.For other words plus ellipsis,adding a different punctuation mark and replacing ellipsis with em dash are utilized.The above translation methods have effectively solved the difficulties in translating culture-loaded expressions and ellipsis in the dialogues of this translation project and improved the author's application ability of translation theory and translation skills.This simulated project is supposed to enlighten other translators on handling the same difficulties.