A Translation Project Report On Whisper Me This(Excerpts)

This is a translation project report.The original text of this project is excerpted from a suspense novel,Whisper Me This,written by an American bestselling author,Kerry Anne King.The novel tells a story where Maisey,the heroine,searches for the truth behind her mother's accidental death.Her mother is diagnosed with domestic violence,but her father is of a mild disposition.Later,Maisey finds her natural father is actually another person,who used to hit her mother and forces her mother to leave Maisey's twin sister with him.Eventually,Maisey and her adoptive father save her elder sister and embark on a brand-new life.The novel exposes the damage of domestic violence both on women and on family.It also encourages a pragmatic and positive attitude towards life.The translator selects the first,second and nineteenth chapters for this translation project.The plot of the novel is closely interlocked.Dialogues take up most part of the story.Each chapter provides clues to Maisey's mother's death,attracting readers to speculate about the truth.Many psychological descriptions make the characters both vivid and lively.Based on the type and features of the source text,the translator applies Newmark's Semantic Translation Theory and Communicative Translation Theory to tackle the translation difficulties encountered.This report attempts to analyze the translation difficulties at three levels:lexical,sentential and discoursal.Determining the c.ontextual meaning of words and guaranteeing the accuracy of words are two of the major difficulties in translation.Under the guidance of Semantic Translation Theory and Communicative Translation Theory,the translator takes into account sentence flexibility as well as the original meaning and the context of difficult words.Communicative Translation Theory is mainly adopted to deal with the translation of long and difficult sentences.The translator segments long sentences into short ones by means of division and amplification,and translate them in conformity to Chinese syntax.The maintenance of discourse coherence is another problem.The translator pays attention to the contextual coherence and reflects the logicality of the original discourse.The translator has gained some experience in the application of Newmark's translation theories from the above translation project.Translators can apply Semantic Translation Theory and Communicative Translation Theory to the same text.Confronted with difficult words,translators can generally apply Semantic Translation Theory and translate the contextual meanings of difficult words.While dealing with long and difficult sentences,translators may adopt Communicative Translation Theory and flexibly use various translation strategies so as to remove barriers to readers.In this way,the reading effect of the translation will be close to that of the original text.