A Report On The Translation Of Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed The World(Chapters 2-3)

The present report is mainly based on the translation practice of Chapter Two and part of Chapter Three of Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World by Lyndall Gordon,a renowned British writer.The source text records the extraordinary lives of Emily Bront? and George Eliot,and analyses the reasons for their great literary success in a male-dominated society where women’s rights and interests were poorly guaranteed.As a literary biography,the book is characterized by deep literariness and various western cultural factors.Peter Newmark(2001: 45)put forward a total of eight translation methods,among which semantic translation and communicative translation exerted a great impact on translation studies.As he argues,semantic translation stresses the importance of faithfulness to the source language and culture while communicative translation aims to make the translated text more intelligible to the readers(ibid: 46-47).Such being the case,the translator selected Newmark’s communicative translation theory to guide and analyze his translation given its strong literariness and cultural factors which are strange for Chinese readers,then managed to find out corresponding translation methods ranging from synchronizing,embedding,reversing,and division for translation of long and complex sentences to free translation and literal translation with notes for translation of cultural and background information and so on.The translation report comprises four parts: Part One is a task description,including an introduction to the source text and to the ST author;Part Two describes the process of translation from preparation to quality control;Part Three,the case study,is the central part of the report,giving a detailed analysis of the translation difficulties and the translation techniques used in translation;Part Four is a summary of the translation report,briefing the lessons learned in the translation practice and the limitations of the report as well as the translation problems to be solved in the future.