A Translation Report Of The Letters Of Sir Walter Scott(Excerpt)

The material of this translation practice comes from the appendix letters of The Letters of Sir Walter Scott.These letters are correspondence between Scott and his business partners,which are mainly about book printing and distribution,cost and profit,bonds and debts,etc.As a carrier for conveying facts and emotions,letters have the characteristics both of informative and expressive.While preserving the original writing style of the letter,the translator finds that the most significant challenge in this translation is how to improve the readability of the translation and make it more understandable to the target language readers.Newmark’s Theory of Communicative Translation provides meaningful guidance for solving this problem.The whole translation process is divided into three parts.Before translation,the translator reads relevant texts and materials and analyzes the translated material’s linguistic characteristics and sentence structures to prepare for the later translation.In the translation process,under the guidance of communicative translation theory,the translator analyzes source text in two parts: lexical level and syntactic level.The translation methods are summarized and used in the translation process through translation examples.On the lexical level,the primary methods used such as addition,conversion,repetition,and using Chinese four-character phrases to comprehend the meaning more accurately;On the syntactic level,combined with communicative theory to analyze semantic missing and the methods of handling passive sentences and long and complicated sentences in the text,such as addition,division and inversion.Based on fidelity to the source text to make the translation more smooth.Finally,the translator proofreads and modifies the translation from two perspectives:whether it conforms to the reading habits of the target language readers and whether the translation conforms to the Chinese expression habits.Based on the text analysis,the translator summarizes the features from the lexical and syntactic of the source text,elaborates the process of this translation practice,discusses the applicability of Newmark’s communicative translation theory to epistolary texts,presents the problems encountered in the translation process and how to solve them,and explains how to adopt appropriate translation methods under the guidance of communicative translation to make the translation more fluent,clear and understandable.Finally,the thesis concludes that communicative translation theory can be an excellent guide for improving the readability of texts and enhancing the communicative effect in epistolary texts translation.