A Project Report On The E-C Translation Of The Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass(Excerpt)

The source text of this project report is an excerpt selected from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.It is an autobiographical text written in a colloquial style with few long and difficult sentences.In general,its language is of moderate difficulty.Given that it features both authenticity and literariness,the author resorts to Newmark's theory of semantic translation and communicative translation as guidance during translation so as to achieve the best effect of expression in language communication.For the specific use of semantic translation,the author mainly adopts literal translation to determine word meaning and retain the syntactic features and rhetorical devices,so as to reproduce the original style of the source text.For the specific use of communicative translation,the author,taking into consideration the differences between Chinese and English languages and cultures,resorts to translation methods including annotation,lexical conversion,domestication,parallel text and restructuring in order to achieve a more fluent and readable translation.At the end of this report,the author draws some conclusions and summarizes her experience in the process of translation.First of all,there are many differences between Chinese and English languages and cultures,so it is necessary for translators to be well prepared and to have a good understanding of the relevant historical and cultural backgrounds before translation.Secondly,in the process of translation,the translator had better grasp personal characters and language styles in an all-round way and select appropriate translation methods flexibly to ensure that the translated text can accurately convey the images of the characters and be accepted by the target language readers.This report mainly aims to explore and summarize the translation methods that are applicable to autobiographical texts and present readers with Frederick Douglass' real life as a slave.Also,the author hopes that this translation practice can help Chinese readers to know more about slave narratives and provide a reference for translating autobiographical texts in the future.