A Report On The Translation Of You Don't Have To Say You Love Me:A Memoir(Excerpts)

This is a report on the translation practice of You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir,a book by American native author Sherman Alexie.You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir is a book about family,love and forgiveness.The author makes his biographical stories of his mother into a novel by combining narrative stories with prose poems.In his book,the sad story is told in a humorous way,with several rhetorical strategies such as metonymy and metaphor.Memoir translation,as a type of literary translation,requires translators to have a deep understanding of the content and the artistic style of the works being translated.A good translator should properly reproduce the original works' artistic image and style so that target readers would experience the similar feeling as the source-text readers do.The translation of dialogue,rhetorical strategies and the style of humor is the major difficulty the author has encountered in this translation project.The translator should deliver the original artistic style to the maximum while conveying information accurately,which is the criterion of a good translation.The above requirement coincides with the functional equivalence theory put forward by the American translator Eugene A Nida.According to Nida's functional equivalence theory,translating is not simply a static linguistic phenomenon.Rather,it is a reproduction in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message both in terms of meaning and style.This report aims to explore the instructive significance of this theory in dealing with characters' dialogue,rhetorical strategies and the style of humor.To get the qualified translation,a translator must make an adequate comparative analysis of the semantic,grammatical and cultural similarities and differences between source text and target text,and then determine the exact meaning of the source text to find the most equivalent and natural language in the target version.In the translation of characters' dialogue,the translator should analyze the characters' personalities,backgrounds,and emotions in concrete circumstance.The translator can imitate what the characters have said,and then adjust the word order to convey the original information properly.In the translation of rhetorical strategies,the translator should consider whether there are any corresponding images in the source language.We may determine whether we should abandon the rhetoric in the source text or not according to the concrete circumstance in source text.In the translation of humor,the translator should take the cultural differences into account.Different types of humors,such as universal humor and linguistic humor,may be dealt with appropriate translation strategies respectively.It is hoped that findings in the present translation project would offer insights for future translation projects.