A Report On The Translation Of The Glimpses Of The Moon(Excerpts)

This translation report is based on the first six parts of The Glimpses of the Moon,written by a well-known American female writer Edith Wharton.The novel tells a story about two young people(Susy and Nick)who get married for the sake of money.However,they are finally apart from each other when conflicts appear after their honeymoon,realizing that true love is more important than fame and fortune.This is a process that the main characters find themselves.Edith Wharton employs flashback to narrate the story.Dialogues and detail descriptions are used often in this novel to show the characters' inner world.Besides,there are many long sentences and some words with western cultures.In this translation report,therefore,the translator mainly demonstrates the problems encountered in the translation from the aspects of vocabulary,sentence and discourse.Nida(2004)put forward the Functional Equivalence Theory and claimed that the target text should not be limited to the form.He also insisted that the meaning was more important than the form.At the lexical and syntactic level,therefore,the translator tries to tackle the problems based on this theory.At the lexical level,some words cannot be translated directly because Chinese and English are different in terms of using part of speech.Besides,different cultural backgrounds lead to the vacancy of word meaning.When such problems exist,the translator mainly adopts the strategies of amplification and conversion.At the syntactic level,however,different expressions between English and Chinese make most English sentences longer than Chinese ones.Translators should adopt the expressions which are more familiar to the target readers in the process of translation.Hence,the translator uses the strategy of division to divide the source text into several parts.Besides,English and Chinese expressions are different in logic.For example,English tends to state the results first while Chinese states the causes first.Therefore,the translator adopts the strategy of reconstruction to make the expression more understandable and acceptable.At the discourse level,the translator implements the Cohesion Theory of Halliday and Hasan(2001)to guide thetranslation practice.Since English and Chinese are different in using cohesive devices,the translator adopts appropriate strategies in the process of translation according to the expression habits to make the target text natural and idiomatic.In the translation of personal reference,the translator uses the strategy of omission to avoid redundancy.When translating demonstrative reference,the translator employs repetition to make the expression more accurate.In the translation of substitution and ellipsis,the translator also adopts the strategy of repetition.