The E-C Translation Report On The White Girl(Chapter 1-3)

This is an English-Chinese translation report.The source text is from the literary work The White Girl written by the Australian indigenous writer Tony Birch,and there is no Chinese version.The translator mainly chooses the first three chapters as the source text and conducts case studies of the difficulties in the translation process.This literary work,related to Australian indigenous culture,tells a story that the little white girl and her grandmother live an ordinary life in a town,but it is disturbed after the arrival of the new officer.The language of this novel is plain,vivid and appealing.Difficulties encountered in the translation process are mainly from lexical,syntactic and dialogic level.Difficulties at lexical level consists the extensive meaning of a word and word class.Syntactic troubles include the translation of passive voice,long and short sentences.Difficulties at dialogic level comprise the reproduction of the characters’ personalities in the novel and the reflection of the colloquial feature of the dialogues.In view of the above difficulties,the report gives corresponding translation methods by giving examples.At lexical level,the translator extends the basic meaning of certain words in a specific context and chooses the appropriate meaning to convey the original idea.But there are occasions when the translation of some other words requires the translator to get rid of the structure of the original text and converts the parts of speech of these words into other parts of speech in the target text so as to make the translation easy for readers to accept and understand.At syntactic level,considering the differences between English and Chinese,the translator shifts the voices to deal with the translation of passive voice in the original text to make the translation conforms to Chinese expression habits.And the method of following the original order and amplification is used to deal with the translation of long and short sentences,which makes the translation more coherent.At dialogic level,considering that the translation should not only reflect the oral characteristics of the dialogues,but also conform to the identity of the characters.The translator uses the free translation and adds modal particles to make the translation more vivid,reproducing characters’ personalities accurately.On the one hand,the translation practice allows the translator to have a better understanding of the Australian indigenous and colonial culture.On the other hand,the translator’s translation ability is improved.At the same time,in view of the limitations in the translation process,the translator should be more diligent in the future and strive to improve the bilingual expression ability.