A Report On The Translation Of Gathering Blossom Under Fire: The Journals Of Alice Walker 1965-2000

This translation practice material is selected from the book Gathering Blossom Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker 1965-2000.The book was written by Alice Walker,a famous American writer.It is a diary biography,a collection of the author’s diaries over several decades.It is a record of the author’s personal life,her literary miscellany and the social events of her time.The source text is a combination of the realism of a diary with the literariness of a literary work,making it a highly distinctive work.The translator has selected part one of the book as the material for this translation,and has completed the English to Chinese translation,with a total number of 11,000 English words.This translation report analyzes the contents of the translation by applying Peter Newmark’s two translation strategies and summarizes the contents in terms of the characteristics of semantic and communicative translation.The translator finds that in this translation,the semantic translation mainly reflects the style of diary literature and objectively conveys the feelings of the author,as well as the semantics of the original text through direct translation method and preservation of grammatical structure.However,the communicative translation mainly meets the reading habits of Chinese readers and enhances the infectiousness of the text by amplification,negation or adjusting syntactic structure,so as to overcome cultural differences.Through analysis of specific cases,the translator reflects on his shortcomings in this translation practice and summarizes the application of semantic translation and communicative translation in the translation of diary,hoping that this report will serve as a resource and provide some references for other diary translations.