A Report Of The Translation Of The Yellow Face(Chapters 1 To 13)

This is a report based on the English-Chinese translation of the suspense novel The Yellow Face,one of the masterpieces of the English writer Frederick Merrick White.The novel consists of 52 chapters,which revolves around the mysterious and terrifying posters of Nostalgia and a bizarre homicide.With the modern mystery novel as the structural frame,The Yellow Face as one of the prototypical suspense novels contains a large number of dialogues and psychological descriptions,and the ups and downs in the plot,making it a fascinating novel.The translation task extracts the suspense setting part as the source text,namely the first 13 chapters of the novel,in which much of the space is devoted to the uncanny resemblance of the facial feature among Anstruther,the bizarrely missing dead,and the eerily poster Nostalgia.The source text covers approximately 30,000 English words,and the number of Chinese characters is more than 50,000.Although the work is culturally important with profound meaning,the majority of Chinese readers are not able to access it,and its Chinese version has not been officially published yet.On account of the translation practice,ten commonly-used translation skills are selected and employed upon the perusal of as many as ten prevailing college coursebooks concerning English-Chinese translation skills.These ten translation skills include the skills with diction,the skills with conversion,the skills with amplification,the skills with omission,the skills with division,the skills with condensation,the skills with translation with tense,the skills with passive sentences,the skills with negative sentences,and the skills with clauses.In the report,as many as 34 case analyses are conducted to illustrate the translation process and the concrete methods of the translation skills.Having acquired the ten commonly-used translation skills and their usages,the translation task is nearly completed.Nonetheless,it is found that both idiosyncratic expressions or odd constructions are ubiquitous in the source text,causing problems from time to time.If such expressions are rendered by the commonly-used skills mentioned above,the translation may run counter to both the original text and the Chinese expressions at times,thus hindering the faithfulness and smoothness of the target text.Given the inconsistencies between the structure and the meaning,Construction Grammar turns out to be the most effective theory to solve the biggest problems during the translation.Construction is the formmeaning pairing and its meaning is not the mechanical combination of its constituent parts but its pragmatic meaning through the Construction coercion or salience of its components semantics.Based on Construction Grammar,three types of constructions are summarized from the source text upon the corresponding pragmatic meanings and specific translation methods.Through 16 specific examples,the report introduced three constructions in detail namely the Oxymoron Construction,the As If-Construction,and the Not the + Superlative Adjective Construction separately.When dealing with these language structures,the translator abandons the simple literal or free translation skills accordingly and turns to probe into the constructional meaning in the light of the context and their pragmatic semantics to achieve the pragmatic and overall aesthetic effects of sentences.The report is composed of five chapters.Chapter One is an overview of the translation task,introducing the relevant contents about the source text.The second chapter serves as a narration of the translation process.In Chapter Three,as many as ten frequently-used translation skills are illustrated by several case analyses.The fourth chapter introduces Construction Grammar to deal with the translation hard nuts caused by the three special constructions upon 16 example sentences.And the last chapter is a summary of achievements and reflections of the whole translation project.