On Characterization In The Translation Of Fifty Shades Freed

Fifty Shades of Grey is the most popular novel in Britain in2012. It is a trilogyincluding: Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. Thenovel states the college girl Anastasia Steele falls in love at first sight with the27-year-old handsome and successful entrepreneur Christian Grey when she goes tointerview the entrepreneur for making a report for her campus newspaper. Howeversoon, the heroine finds the handsome Grey has a special penchant: sadomasochism.Struggling on the brink of love and pain, Ana discovers more and more secret humanshades of Grey. The hot novel was filmed as a documentary and screened on theChannel Four of Britain to explore its sensation, through interviewing persons fromall walks of life and performers’ staging of the story.In novel writing, characterization is the major depiction for an author. In thethree elements (characters, plot and environment) of a novel, characterization is thecore. Plot and environment depictions serve for characterization. Therefore, in theprocess of novel translation, without profound understanding and reproduction ofcharacterizations in the original, the translator would not accurately reproducecharacters and writing style. However, in order to reproduce characterizations, thetranslator must highlight the methods of characterization, especially dialogue,environment and mental depictions in a novel. In Fifty Shades Freed, there are a lot ofdepictions of dialogue, environment and psychology to shape two characters:Christian and Ana. The writer chose the first two chapters of the novel to dotranslating. The whole process of translating was conducted under the guidance ofEugene A. Nida’s functional equivalence, exploring how to reproduce the charactersin the novel.This thesis mainly focuses on the discussion on how to explicitly reproducecharacters in novel translation from the descriptions of dialogues and environmentswith novel characterization as an entry point. It consists of four parts, namely taskdescription, process description, case analysis and conclusion. Through this thesis, the writer aims to clear that translators should carve and refine the descriptions ofdialogues and environments in novel translation, and employ best translationstrategies suited to different types of descriptions to reproduce characters explicitlyand vividly.