A Report On E-C Translation Of Beneath A Marble Sky（Introduction To Chapter 2）

The report on the E-C translation of the historical novel Beneath a Marble Sky,covering the part from Introduction to Chapter Two,is about 12,000 words in total.John Shors,an American writer,is the author of the book.The book describes the unimaginable wealth and power,the ferocious sibling rivalry and brutal tyranny,and the origins of the Taj Mahal from the perspective of Princess Jahanara.The selected chapters are part of Princess Jahanara’s recollections of her childhood.The genre of historical fiction is based on historical facts,but it differs from history textbooks in that it can make appropriate imagination,generalization and fiction,and can artistically reproduce the historical customs and general situation of the time,so it is more interesting than documentary texts and more likely to attract readers.At the same time,it can be used to understand history through the reader’s aesthetic appreciation.Some reflections on history,as well as cognitive and aesthetic insight,can also be gained to correctly understand and summarize history.The translator studies the Chinese translation of the book from the Introduction to the Chapter Two at the level of lexical,sentences and style,and analyzes the difficulties in translation,such as how to reproduce the expression of characters’ feelings and convey the author’s meaning when there are many descriptions of dialogues;how to make the readers understand more clearly when historical facts and real historical figures are involved,etc.Considering the textual genre and difficulties of Beneath a Marble Sky,the translator is guided by Steiner’s fourfold motion of hermeneutic translation,which is respectively trust,aggression,incorporation and compensation.Taking Beneath a Marble Sky from Introduction to Chapter Two as a case study,based on the theory of hermeneutic translation by George Steiner,the translator aggresses the words in the source text,incorporates the meaning and form of the source text,and finally compensates the source text and the translated text to achieve a certain balance in meaning and form.The use of Steiner’s four-step theory of hermeneutic translation can optimize the transmission of information from the original text and improve the quality of the author’s translation,which further improves the readability of the translation.