A Report On The E-C Translation Of Giles Goat-Boy(Excerpts)from The Perspective Of Thick Translation

This practice report is based on the translation practice of Giles Goat-Boy written by John Barth in 1966.There has not been any previous Chinese version published before.Giles Goat-Boy is an iconic postmodern novel.It requires the translator to have some knowledge of postmodernism before approaching it properly.As one of Barth's most complex novels,Giles Goat-Boy fuses history,politics,literature,mythology,and philosophy together,weaving a web of relationships between these discourses by intertextuality.Thus,the demands on the translator's learning and ingenuity are strenuous.Giles Goat-Boy is "splendrously musicked out" in terms of language,where John Barth plays with the conventions of language freely through language experimentation(code-mixing and wordplay).It requires the translator to recreate such experimental aspects,while catering to the acceptability of the target readers.Based on his translation of the first three chapters of Volume Two,the translator mainly reports and discusses three translation difficulties that require extra efforts in the analysis and synthesis phases of the translation process:How to read Giles Goat-Boy,how to trace its elements of intertextuality and reproduce them for Chinese readers,and how to solve difficulties caused by the language experimentation of the original text.After sketching out the attempts made by the translator to overcome comprehension obstacles,the report elaborates on the approaches taken by the translator,under the guidance of the thick translation theory,for the synthesis phase.A case study is made to show how to construct thick contexts for the target readers by employing different paratextual devices,namely,preface,footnotes,and endnotes,and how to produce a target text that is intelligible to Chinese readers as well as faithful to the original,with all the rich connotations intact.It is hoped that this practice report can shed some light on the translation of John Barth's other novels,or even other literary works of postmodern fiction,in the future.