A Report On The Translation Oiroderick Hudson

The translation task is Roderick Hudson, the first full-length novel of famous Americanwriter Henry James. It tells a talent American artist Roderick Hudson, came to Italy learningsculpture under the guidance of an art appreciator Rowland Mallet, but Hudson lost himselfthere and his inspiration shrunk off, at last, he died in the storm at Alps. It hasn’t beentranslated in China. This translation task is part of Foreign Language Teaching and ResearchPress Bilingual Project. The novel is translated by six students, and chapter twelve to thirteenis by me.The full text includes the source text, target text and translation report which iscomposed of four parts.The first part tells the source and requirements of the task and introduces the works ofthe writer and the content of this novel. As one of the tasks of Foreign Language Teaching andResearch Press Bilingual Project, the sentence-to-sentence pattern on the network platform isneeded, therefore it is different from the traditional literary translation. Although Henry Jamesplays an important role in American literary history, few of his works has been translated toChinese readers, as his first long novel, Roderick Hudson has never been published in Chineseand seldom been mentioned. Reference material shortage increases the difficulties intranslation.The second part describes the process of the whole translation. In the preparation, afterreading on the fiction and studying translation theory, I choose functional equivalence theoryput forward by Eugene A. Nida to guide this task. I translated the fiction twice and list someimpressive examples during the process. At last, the Chinese version was reviewed for severaltimes to ensure its fluency. The third part analyzes some translation methods applied in the task. Guided byfunctional equivalence theory and based on the contrast of Chinese-English, the analysis ofthe examples is given in terms of words and sentences. As to the words and expressions,examples are mainly from conversion of word class, addition and the same words in differenttranslation. And on sentence level, the analysis comes from sentence-division andsentence-combination, as well as long sentence translation, and some examples are illustratedto explain the characteristics of them.The fourth part summarizes the lessons I have got from this translation task: a goodtranslator should be armed with exact understanding of English, decent Chinese expression,extensive knowledge and fast-learning ability.