The Acquisition And Application Of Strategies For Children’s Literature Translation

Children’s literature is written for children with its unique characteristics.The quality of children’s literature translation directly affects the language acquisition of children.However,the current quality of domestic children’s literature translation varies and translators lack a systematic understanding of children’s literature translation strategies.At present,most of the domestic studies focus on the analysis of children’s literature translation strategies rather than the acquisition and application of them and the ways to improve translators’ ability.In recent years,Wang(2016,2018,2019)proposed the xu-argument and emphasized that continuation can promote language acquisition.Continuation translation is thus proposed as an effective way to improve learners’ translation skills.In order to know whether and how continuation translation improves translators’ translation skills,a case study is designed to investigate how translators learn and apply strategies for children’s literature translation through continuation translation.This study intended to investigate the translators’ acquisition and application of two translation strategies,domestication and foreignization,from four aspects: phonology,vocabulary,syntax and rhetoric.The research questions include:(1)Is continuation translation an effective method to help learn and apply strategies for children’s literature translation? If yes,why?(2)In the process of learning translation strategies for children’s literature through continuation translation,what points should learners focus on?(3)What kind of difficulties and problems might learners encounter during the process of continuation translation practice? How should learners overcome the difficulties and solve the problems?A student of MTI participated in the present study,which was conducted through three steps,namely,translation test,continuation translation training and retranslation.In the translation test,the participant translated an English fairy tale into Chinese,and the completed translation was submitted to three teachers specializing in translation for grading.Then,four rounds of continuation translation training were conducted,with the materials selected from Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales and the translation versions by Ye Junjian.The specific moves of each round of training were as follows: 1)read the source text of a fairy tale and its excellent translation;2)study the excellent translation in depth and analyze its language characteristics and translation strategies;3)read the source text of another fairy tale,imitate the excellent translation and translate this story.The participant was required not to read materials related to translation strategies of Children’s literature during the task and to keep process logs to record her acquisition,application and reflection of translation strategies.After the task,the participant was asked to translate another English fairy tale and the translation was submitted to the same three teachers for grading.Major findings of this study include:(1)The continuation translation task is effective in helping learners acquire and apply children’s literature translation strategies.(2)Short-term continuation translation training is effective in helping learners translate long sentences and exclamations The effect is less pronounced on learning translation strategies for reduplication,passive sentences and rhetoric.(3)There are three points to note in continuation translation task: First,learners should make full preparation for the task.Second,learners should mark the important and difficult points of translation and the translation strategies used by the excellent translator.Third,learners should notice the problems,the solutions to them,and the unsolved problems in the task.(4)Problems in continuation translation include how to translate common words and how to use the translation technique addition appropriately.This study is of both theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,it enriches the research types of the xu-argument and sheds some light on the development of the xu-argument and continuation translation.Practically,this study might in the long run contribute to further study on how to improve the translation skills of bilingual speakers,and inspires second language learning and teaching.