A Report On The E-C Translation Of Meant To Be (Excerpts)

The material chosen for this translation practice project is the latest novel Meant to be by American author Emily Giffin,with excerpts from the first four chapters of the novel.In the process of practice,the author found that one of the characteristics of this material is that there are many long and difficult sentences,which became a major object of the author’s research.Compared with short sentences,the most intuitive feature of long sentences is that they are long,with many words and complex structures.And long sentences have more modifying or juxtaposing elements,and the sentence structure is often not easy to understand.Thus,it is a great challenge for translators to translate long and complex sentences from English into Chinese.If the long and complex sentences in English are not properly handled,the reader will not appreciate the beauty of the translation,which will be a main difficulty for the author in the practice.Although many scholars have obtained great achievements on the topic of “translating long and complex English sentences into Chinese”,further research is still valuable.The main issue discussed in this paper is the method of translating long and complex sentences in English.The translation of novels also requires translators to take into account as much as possible the artistic style of the original text as well as the ideological content expressed by the author.Therefore,a high-quality translation should try its best to reflect the writing style and language characteristics of the original text on the basis of accurate meaning,which coincides with the functional equivalence theory proposed by American translator Eugene Nida.Based on the theory of functional equivalence,this paper reviews and analyzes the selected passages of the novel Meant to be,and discusses the translation methods of long and complex English sentences.In Chapter III,the author gives specific examples and summarizes the corresponding translation strategies,such as literal translation with adjusted sentence structure,adding translation notes,free translation,sequential sentence breaking,and additional or omitted translation by reorganizing the structure,in order to make the translation appropriate,natural and fluent,and to achieve functional equivalence.It is hoped that the translation strategies summarized by the author will be useful for the translation of similar novel texts.