A Report On The Translation Of Immortal Stories (Excerpt)

The source text is selected from Chapter 6(My Father)of Zheng Zhi’s story collection Immortal Stories.The book takes the layoff tide of the 1990 s in northeast China as the general background and describes the ups and downs of grassroots during the historical period.The seemingly simple language of the novel contains many hidden meanings,as evidenced in the use of many instances of dialects.The author’s creative use of varieties of language styles causes many difficulties in the present translation project.After reading the text,the translator decides to take Jef Verschueren’s linguistic adaptation theory as the theoretical guidance.At the same time,the translator uses different translation strategies to express the source text’s meaning as faithfully as possible.Main ideas and concepts of linguistic adaptation theory turn out to be equally applicable to the analysis of the translation process.This translation report analyzes the translation process from the perspectives of lexical adaptation,syntactic adaptation and textual adaptation.At the level of adaptation in the translation of lexical phrases,the translator uses free translation to analyze cultural-loaded words to reduce cultural default in translation to a certain extent and highlights the role of context by analyzing highly contextualized words.In terms of adaptation in the translation of utterances,the translator analyzes narrative sentences and dialogues respectively and further discusses the translation characteristics of narrative and dialogue.At the level of adaptation in the translation of text,the translator uses cohesion of anaphora,connection,and coherence to achieve overall control of the translation.This translation project enhances the translator’s understanding of literary text translation.It can also provide references for other translators to handle similar literary texts.