A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of "Old Woman Magoun"

This translation report is based on the English-Chinese translation of American writer Mary Wilkins Freeman's short story "Old Woman Magoun".It is about the desperate choice a strong and assertive grandmother made for her innocent and beautiful granddaughter Lily.The short story has not been translated into Chinese before.The style of a literary work is showed in the words,sentence patterns,rhetorical devices and artistic devices and their repetition frequency.Therefore,the goal of this translation is to maintain,or reproduce the linguistic and stylistic features of the source text,making target readers feel the beauty of the language and style of the story.The differences between Chinese and English,and the differences in rhetorical devices and even in usages of punctuation mark pose difficulties for successful translation.This report illustrates the translation strategies and techniques adopted to deal with four types of translation difficulties.First,the techniques of "transliteration+free translation" and amplification are used in the translation of proper names which contain key information.Second,in regard to the translation of rhetoric devices,in terms of parallelism,the strategy is to make the translated paralleled component have the same number of characters.And in terms of alliteration,two strategies are adopted:rhyme and the use of four-character phrase.Third,in the translation of sentences with dash,dash is kept when the usage of dash in Chinese and English is the same,and dash is changed when the usage is different.Last,in terms of nonstandard English,four strategies are proposed:wrong Chinese characters,mismatch,the use of colloquial expression,and grammatical mistake.In the face of different translation difficulties,translators should flexibly adopt different translation strategies and tactics,strive to overcome the barriers caused by differences between two languages,and let the response of target readers akin to that of source text readers.