| Mystery novel has been one of the most popular fiction genres in recent decades due to the gripping events,mysterious atmosphere,and exciting plots.Out of interest,the author chooses the American best seller The Last Thing He Told Me as the translation material and writes the report based on the corresponding translation practice.The novel is written by Laura Dave,an up-and-coming American novelist,who tells a story of the protagonist establishing an intimate relationship with her stepdaughter in the process of seeking the truth about her husband’s missing.In translating the novel,the author summarizes two major kinds of problems,which is the equivalence on the lexical level and the equivalence on the syntactical level.To address the problems,the author finds out the corresponding measures based on Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory and tries to discuss how to apply the theory in the translation of mystery novels.Written from the first-person point of view,The Last Thing He Told Me includes a large number of dialogues and interspersed flashback scenes of the protagonist’s memories.Therefore,in the process of translation,the first thing the author should pay attention to is how to make the translation more readable.This involves the choice of meanings of words and the free translation of words.How to choose the most proper meanings of words to ensure the faithfulness and fluency of the translation is one of the problems the author should focus on.Secondly,the narrative of the novel is literary,and the translation of its long and difficult sentences is one of the difficulties in this translation report.When dealing with long and difficult sentences,the author adopts translation techniques such as adjusting word order,splitting,and regrouping according to the context.Moreover,this novel involves a large number of dialogues.When translating dialogues,the author should use as simple and colloquial expressions as possible to ensure that the style of the translation is consistent with that of the original text.Last but not least,as the story background of the novel is set against the financial fraud in a technology company,the translation involve financial and legal terms,and the author needs to search for relevant information to complete the translation accurately.Through this translation practice,the author applies the theoretical knowledge she has learned into practice,which greatly deepens the author’s understanding of translation theory and translation skills. |
