Report On The Translation Of Midnight In Dostoevsky

This thesis is the translation report of a short story—Midnight in Dostoevsky. Thesource text is taken from a short story collection—The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Storieswritten by American writer Don DeLillo. His works feature intricate sentences andmiscellaneous styles, which enroll a real picture of Americans’ mental states inmodern society.Midnight in Dostoevsky describes the daily life of two college boys who engagethemselves in a detective game. The story is written from the perspective of theleading character—Robby, who made delicate observation of the world around.Throughout this long-playing game, the observer, viz. Robby’s vivid descriptions ofthe people and the surroundings, and dialogues where Robby and Todd werepracticing reasoning and imagination, contribute much to the detective atmosphere.In regard to plot setting, observation is the beginning step of the detective game.Reasoning, which is based on observation, approaches the fact step by step. In termsof language structures, absolute structure and adjective fragments represent theobservation process owing to their descriptive nature; dialogue is the carrier uponwhich the boys accessed and processed the observation results through reasoning andimagination. These two parts, on the whole, combine to advance the plot and makethe story a compact and evenly rhythmic whole. In terms of language style, unlikeDeLillo’s habitual diction which is tricky and delicate, language of this text is plain,concise and real, in that it only describes common campus life.To deal with the language structure and language style properly, the translatormainly applied the strategy of literal translation, which controlled adding or deletingof words strictly to retain the original structure. By this way, the translator intended tobring out the observation-reasoning detective style.