A Report On The Translation Of The Riddles Of Rock Church(Excerpt)

The Riddles of Rock Church,written by Professor Milo Kaufman,is a collection of short religious novels,which depicts Professor Milo's experiences,observations and thoughts about Christianity in his daily life in a straight,witty and vivid way.On the recommendation of the tutor,the translator was very honored to get the opportunity to translate this great masterpiece.And the translator wrote the translation practice report based on the translation of the three novels in the collection,namely,“The Riddles of Rock Church”,“A Tour of the War Zone” and “A Church Bell for Nagaland” under the guidance of semantic translation and communicative translation theory proposed by Peter Newmark.The translation difficulties encountered in the translation process mainly include religious common and proper nouns,American idioms,images in metaphors,dialogues,long and complex sentences and so on.For the better comprehension of the source text and expression in the target language,the translator manages to understand points related to religion by referring to the dictionary,network resources and paper resources,and consulting tutors and experts.In addition,the translator analyzes the specific translation problems and identifies the translation methods and techniques to be adopted under the guidance of semantic translation and communicative translation theory.Specifically,the translator adopts communicative translation in paraphrasing American idioms,replacing uncommon images,adding time adverbs and time auxiliaries,shifting passive sentences,and dividing and reconstructing long and complex sentences so as to make the translation more concise,fluent,natural,and in line with the expressive habits of target readers.In the meanwhile,the translator adopts semantic translation to deal with dialogues in the source text so as to retain the linguistic features of the dialogue and reproduce vivid scenes,characters' characteristics and moods.Finally,the translator combines semantic translation and communicative translation methods to deal with common religious nouns by literal translation and annotation,which helps readers better understand the source text while retaining the religious style,and to translate names of people and places related to Christianity by transliteration and annotation in which relationships between these proper nouns and Christianity and context are highlighted.By translating The Riddles of Rock Church,the translator hopes that this great masterpiece could be introduced into China so as to popularize relevant religious knowledge and improve target readers' understanding of Christianity.In addition,the translator also hopes that the translation and report can provide reference for the translation of religious novels,and enrich the research work of religious novel texts for the purpose of strengthening the construction of related disciplines.