A Practice Report On The E-C Translation Of Samoan Novel They Who Do Not Grieve(Excerpt)

This translation material is selected from They Who Do Not Grieve by Sia Figiel,the first contemporary female novelist in Samoa,who wove together three generations of women's voices from Samoa and New Zealand with perfect poetic techniques.Translation practice based on Samoan literature has been a rare occasion.The author hopes that her attempt is able to call more attention to this area.The author selects Book One of the novel as the material for this translation practice,and writes the practice report based on it.Due to the writer's unique writing style,the novel presents unique literary features and outstanding artistic values,which has brought many difficulties to the translation.In this report,through an in-depth study on the examples,the author expounds the difficulties which she has encountered in the process of translation from the perspectives of words,syntax and text,and finally proposes the corresponding translation methods to address each of the difficulties.At the lexical level,the author studies how to deal with repeated words and filthy words.At the syntactical level,the author discusses the translation of sentence fragments and short sentence chunks.At the textual level,the author elaborates how to reproduce the poetic effect and to deal with the cultural default of the source text in the translation.Through the reflections on the translation problems and the discussions about feasible strategies and methods,the author has enhanced her understanding of translation theories,improved her abilities to address practical translation problems,and more importantly,gained significant insights on literary translation as well as Samoan literature in particular.The author hopes that this translation practice and study can make some contribution to studies of Samoan literature and literary translation studies.