A Report On The Translation Of Forbidden Love (Excerpt)

The source text of this Chinese-English translation practice report comes from The Forbidden Love,a novella written by Eileen Chang.Chang made innovations in traditional Chinese language in this novel,giving the traditional expressions,like four-character expressions,new meaning which is different from their traditional meaning.The application of reduplicated expressions makes the source text more rhythmic and musical.The Europeanized usage fills the source text with foreign flavor.Therefore,it has certain practical meaning in translating the text and writing the translation practice report.In the report,the translator firstly provides a brief introduction to the background,purpose and significance of the translation report;then,on the basis of preparations before translation and translation practice report,the translator summarizes the language features and corresponding translation difficulties.Concerning the features of numerous Europeanized expressions,reduplicated expressions and Chinese four-character expressions,the translator offers a thorough analysis to demonstrate the translation process and translation methods by citing a series of examples.After analysis,it is found that the method of correspondence is the best choice when it comes to the characters' Europeanized names.The methods of correspondence and variation are necessary when translating a group of adjectives,an Europeanized usage typically ended with the character “?” in the source text.The method of addition is adopted in translation of the “?+quantifier” expressions to ensure that the translated version conforms to the usage of the target language.The reduplicated expressions and four-character expressions generally are dealt with the method of addition or transformation to better convey the rhythmic feature or the cultural background behind them,such as the application of alliterative phrases or the idioms of similar meanings in the target language;as an alternative,the method reduction is applied sometimes to keep the translated version simple and concise when the addition or transformation is inapplicable.The translation of culture-loaded expressions follows the “foreignization first,domestication second” rule to faithfully convey the cultural implications as much as possible on the premise that the translated version is readable.In a word,the application of various translation methods is necessary both to convey the meaning of the source text and reveal its language style in a correct way.Despite that,there are still some limitations: when the rhythm is maintained in translating the reduplicated expressions by adopting the alliterative phrases,the translated version is short of concision;the readability is at the expense of some losses of cultural implications in the cultural-loaded expressions.Therefore,the translation is far from being perfect.But still,the translator hopes that this report can be a reference to oncoming translators and researchers.