A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Reservoir Tapes(Excerpts)

Many readers have a crash on English suspense novels for their meticulous description and gripping plots,which are the main objects concerned and introduced by the translation and publishing communities.The Reservoir Tapes,written by the British novelist Jon Mc Gregor,is a typical suspense novel mirroring the different daily lives of ordinary people triggered by the disappearance of a teenage girl.Considering its typicality in both the genre and style,The Reservoir Tapes is a good choice for literary translation practice.The present practice report is based on the translation of chapters 1-5 of The Reservoir Tapes.In Levy's view,translation is the constant process of finding options in target language for the source text and then selecting the best one from the paradigms.The practice finds that the “definitional and selective instructions”,“minimax strategy”,and “illusion theory” in his theoretical framework can well guide the translation project.The translator applies the chosen thoughts respectively to three levels: words,sentences and paragraphs.Cases in practice are selected to analyze lexical translation under the definitional and selective instructions,syntactic translation with the minimax strategy and paragraphic construction under the illusion theory.Translation of The Reservoir Tapes shows the guiding merit of Jiri Levy's theories in translating contemporary suspense novels and reveals the importance and limits of translators' initiatives.Readers enjoying the work are supposed to realize the efforts and values of translators hidden behind the translation,so as to better appreciate the beauty in translation.