A Translation Report On The Painted Door

This thesis is a translation project report on The Painted Door written by a famous Canadian writer Sinclair Ross. The Painted Door is a classic prairie novel telling a story in a farmer’s house in Northern prairie of Canada. The husband went to visit his father on a blizzard day, while his wife turned out to commit adultery before he returned home. Knowing his wife’s betrayal, the husband left home and was frozen to death. In the novel, Ross delicately describes the influences on people caused by external environment and portrays the heroine’s complex mental activities. Besides, in this psychological novel, there are many sentences describing the characters’ psychological activities, which results in a difficulty in translating the original novel into its Chinese version. Guided by Yan Fu’s translation criteria "faithfulness, expressiveness, elegance", the thesis conducts the research on the skills of translating The Painted Door from three perspectives:the application of four-word phrases and duplicated words, the method of translating descriptive sentences, and the reproduction of the novel’s style. Further, through a comparison of the two Chinese versions translated respectively by Nie Sen and the thesis author, the thesis aims to emphasize the principles of the retranslation of literary works.