An E-C Translation Report On The School For German Brides(Excerpts):Difficulties In And Coping Tactics For Reproducing Context Of Dialogues In The Novel

This translation report is based on the excerpt from The School for German Brides organized by a lot of life-oriented dialogues among the characters.This translation report focuses on solving difficulties caused by reproducing context and then comes up with corresponding translation strategies.Context plays an important role in the process of communication,which affects the generation and understanding of discourse.Due to the differences in the use and understanding of language between Chinese and Western people,it is difficult to reproduce the context in translation.Based on Hu Zhuanglin’s classification of context,the translator divides the difficulties of this translation report into the following three categories:(1)Difficulties in reproducing the situational context;(2)Difficulties in reproducing the linguistic context;(3)Difficulties in reproducing the cultural context.Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance theory provides a theoretical basis for the above difficulties.In relevance theory,the process of communication is regarded as “ostensive inference”,and the translator needs to deduce the information of the speaker or author according to the context,so as to obtain the relevance.At the same time,the translator should achieve the optimal relevance,that is,make the target language readers pay the least effort to obtain sufficient contextual effects.Based on this theory,the author puts forward corresponding tactics to reach a balance between the target language readers and the source language recipients,which are as follows:(1)amplification and negation could be used to deal with the difficulties in reproducing the situational context;(2)semantic extension and conversion could be used to deal with the difficulties in reproducing the linguistic context;(3)literal translation with annotation and substitution could be used to deal with the difficulties in reproducing the cultural context.It was proved that the above translation solutions proposed by the author can effectively solve the difficulties in reproducing context of dialogues in the novel.The author hopes that this report can provide inspiration and reference for other translators to solve such problems.