Translation Strategies And Skills Analysis Of Poor White Chinese Translation

This article consists of two parts. The first part is the translation of a selected section of Sherwood Anderson’s masterpiece Poor White, the second part is the analysis of the theories employed in this particular translation practice to guide the translation and the methods applied to achieve the desired goal.Poor White is a novel written by American famous novelist Sherwood Anderson in 1920. Poor White takes us along the journey of Hugh McVey as he grows from a dazed social outcast to a successful shaker of commerce, from the 1890s into the 20th century. Through telling the personal tale of some typical figures in the era, the author intended to illustrate the impacts of the Industrial Revolution on America in general.The excerpt is a critical part of the novel. It tells the story after Hugh came to the small town Bidwell in mid-west America and before he met with another key character Steve Hunter. The author introduced the background and characteristic of the key figures and setting of the story. It helps readers to understand the author’s attitude, intention and the theme of the novel.The language of the excerpt is relatively difficult, because instead of simple conversations, the content is mainly descriptions and monologues written in long sentences. Based on the translation practice, the second part of the thesis analyses the translation theory and skills employed. The main translation theory referred in the translation practice is translation theorist Peter Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation theory. The theory is used to guide the translation, and to achieve the goal of producing the same effect on the target language reader. To achieve this goal, there are mainly three techniques applied, namely semantic extension and explanation/amplification, semantic adoption/transformation, sentence restructure/word order readjustment.