A Report On The Translation Of Our Nigs,Sketches From The Life Of A Free Slave From The Perspective Of Chesterman's Translation Norm Theory

This report is a translation project report based on a novel,Our Nigs,Sketches from the Life of a Free Slave.It is an autobiographical novel by the first American black woman writer Harriet E.Wilson.The author described her miserable childhood in the third-person point of view to denounce racism.Since there is no Chinese version of this novel published up to now,the translator translates it in this project.The Translation Norms Theory is used to guide the thesis.Toury has put forward a series of translation norms.Chesterman has come up with the idea that translation norms influence the way how translators think and translate invisibly.He divided the translation norms into expectancy norms and professional norms,the latter of which was further divided into accountability norms,communication norms and relation norms.Expectancy norms require translators to satisfy readers' expectations.Accountability norm refers that translators should meet the demand of loyalty to any other related parties.Communication norm requires translators to optimize communication between all the parties involved.Relation norm requires translators to set up a proper relation of relevance.This report selects the EC translation of Our Nigs,Sketches from the Life of a Free Slave as the case for analysis.In order to analyze the applicability of the four translation norms in the autobiographical novel,the author has chosen some different cases and then analyzed the adopted translation strategies.After the detailed analysis,the author finds that Chesterman's four translation norms are applicable in autobiographical novel,but there are still some cases that are not idiomatic.In these special cases,the translator needs to exert their subjective initiative to solve these problems.In translation,faced with some language barriers and lack of cultural equivalence,translators must adopt some appropriate translation strategies from syntactic,semantic and pragmatic aspects to meet readers'expectancy,communicate to the maximum and maintain the relation between source text and target text in order to convev literary beauty.This report is divided into four parts.The first part is mainly about the translation project,including the introduction of translation project and its process.The second part includes the introduction of translation theory.The third part is about the analysis of translation cases,difficulties met in translation and strategies used by the translator.The last part is about the experience gained from the translation process and shortcomings that the translator realized in the process.