A Report On The Translation Of The Long Flight Home (Excerpts)

This report,based on the practice of the selected chapters of The Long Flight Home,is an analysis of the whole translation process.This novel is an engrossing story about love and sacrifice in that it is tightly structured and exquisitely written,with smooth scene switching and meticulous description of psychological activities.Presently,the Chinese version of this novel has not been published yet.After rounds of revisions,the translator has produced a reflective summary of the obstacles during translation and corresponding solutions.Considering the linguistic features of source text,the translator adopted two major concepts in Relevance Translation Theory proposed by Gutt to help address the difficulties appeared in the while-translating phase as well as the proofreading afterwards.Many techniques were employed in this process.At lexical level,extension,splitting and colloquialism were used to help transfer the style and meaning of the original,as well as meet the expressing habits and cognitive environments of target receptors.In addition,annotation was an indispensable complement to the losses of cultural and encyclopedic information.At syntactic level,the employment of cutting,reconstruction and adjustment of word order facilitated overcoming the discrepancies in thinking patterns and sentence structure to ensure the readability.Meanwhile,on the basis of fully considering the cognitive context,tone shift and paraphrase could effectively reveal the underlying meaning,foil the atmosphere and finally achieve the interpretive resemblance to the largest degree.At textual level,the use of amplification and cohesive devices ensured the logic and integrity by connecting related meaning groups and reducing the sense of blocking.This translation practice can enhance people's understanding toward relevant history and also functions as an inspiration or a reference for others in the same type of translation.However,some limitations are still unavoidable,featuring the lack of encyclopedic knowledge,the insufficiency of theoretical framework and practical experience,and immaturity of case analysis.At the end of this report,the translator pointed that it is of great necessity to further excavate the inference process during translation.