A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of Selected Short Stories From The New Yorker

The translation report is based on translations of three short stories selected from The New Yorker.The three articles,with a total of 20,668 English words,have not been translated into Chinese so far.They deal with American racial discrimination,family life and aspects of social life respectively.It is hoped that the Chinese translation of these stories can help Chinese readers better understand American society and promote cultural communication between China and America.Additionally,the translator intends his translation to be of some reference value to the literary translation.The translation practice is completed under the guidance of Peter Newmark's semantic translation and communicative translation approaches and the report discusses the difficulties and their solutions from lexical and syntactic levels in translation process.For lexical translation,a polysemous word whose contextual meaning can be understood by consulting dictionaries should be reproduced in the target text with the guidance of semantic translation.As for translation of words that can be rendered into the target text by techniques such as conversion,extension,amplification and liberal translation should be guided by communicative translation for the purpose of making the translated version fluent and idiomatic.Syntactically,translation without changing the original order is completed under the guidance of semantic translation while division and reorganizing of sentence structures are made by communicative approach in order to make the target text smooth and fluent.At the end of the report,the translator concludes that semantic translation and communicative translation approaches can guide the translation of short stories effectively and help the translator reproduce the contextual meaning and effects of the source texts accurately.