A Report On The Translation Of Apartment 3B(Chapter 1-Chapter 2)

This is a report based on the English-Chinese translation of Apartment 3B by Patricia Scanlan,one of Irish bestsellers.The novel narrates various stories that relate to the main characters who are involved in Apartment 3B.As popular fiction,the book is written in an easy-to-understand way with few intricate expressions.In spite of the fact that Apartment 3B enjoys great popularity and is highly appraised in Ireland,the majority of Chinese readers are not able to access it,and the Chinese version of the novel has not been published yet.Apartment 3B comprises six chapters,of which the first two chapters are excerpted as the source text for the translation task.The source text covers more than 27,000 English words,and the Chinese characters are approximately counted as 50,000 when it is translated into Chinese.As literary translation can be taken as a demanding task to a certain degree,it is inevitable that translators have to encounter some obstacles in the process of translation.On the one hand,it is deemed that English and Chinese have something in common such as word classes.On the other hand,more differences exist between the two languages,at both the syntactic level and the textual level.For example,English is mainly characterized by hypotaxis while parataxis chiefly features Chinese.With the purpose to render a coherent and cohesive translation,taking both the similarities and the differences into consideration,it is requisite for a translator to grasp various translation skills.After reading four popular coursebooks for English-Chinese translation,ten commonly-used translation skills are employed in the report accordingly,namely diction,amplification,omission,conversion,perspective shift,skills with tense,skills with passive voice,skills with negative structures,skills with English set phrases and skills with lengthy sentences.What is more,44 case analyses are conducted in detail from the perspective of the ten translation skills respectively.The frequently-used translation skills serve as solutions to most common hindrances in the translation process,and the task is almost completed smoothly.In the English-Chinese translation process,nevertheless,it is found that both complex sentences and compound sentences introduced by adverbs or conjunctions including when,where,as,because and so are pervasively available in the source text.And it is not an easy walk in the park to translate such sentences literally.Besides,if they are translated by adopting their seemingly similar counterparts,i.e.,Chinese complex or compound sentences,without a further examination,the target text would run counter to the Chinese expressions from time to time,failing to meet the objectives of faithfulness and smoothness.Furthermore,such a problem cannot be resolved fittingly by the above-mentioned skills,which constitutes a bottleneck in the task.According to cognitive linguistics,the differences between English and Chinese complex or compound sentences can be attributed to the divergent cognitive mechanisms of English and Chinese constructions.English is featured by time-space distinction,while time and space are conflated in Chinese.Words like conjunctions and adverbs are availed to separate the linguistic structures with eventuality or temporality when constructing English complex or compound sentences.On the contrary,in Chinese,conjunctions and adverbs that lack temporal implications(metachronistic)are rarely embedded between such linguistic structures.With the help of an in-depth analysis of the fundamental difference between English and Chinese complex and compound sentences from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,a variety of linguistic structures are employed appropriately as a supplement to the translation skills listed above,instead of translating all of them by means of the commonly-used methods,i.e.,adopting their Chinese counterparts rigidly.In other words,both the temporal and the spatial features equipped in various English complex and compound sentences should be embodied by the corresponding linguistic structures with temporality or spatiality in a flexible way so as to ensure the target text to consistently comply with the Chinese expressions.The report is composed of five chapters.Chapter One is a general description of the translation task,including an introduction to both the source material and the author,the motivation for the task as well as the structure of the report.The second chapter gives an account of the translation process.In the next chapter,dozens of case analyses are illustrated by virtue of ten frequently-used translation skills.Chapter Four mainly focuses on both the similarities and the differences between English and Chinese complex and compound sentences from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Moreover,a larger number of such special sentences in the source text are dealt with properly by wielding the theory of time-space conflation.And the last chapter summarizes both the experience and the limitations of the translation report.