E-C Selected Translation Of Herman Melville:a Study Of His Life And Vision And A Critical Commentary

Herman Melville:A Study of His Life and Vision is a biography of Herman Melville by Lewis Mumford, an American historian, literary critic and sociologist. This book was first published in the United States of America in1929, and republished in1962. The book mainly studies and analyzes the relations between Herman Melville’s life experience and his work.This book is divided into three parts. The first part "Olympian" mainly tells about the life of Melville’s childhood and the beginning of his writing career. The second part "Titan", describes the success and failure Melville met in his writing process. The third part concentrates on the life experience and works of Melville when he became old. The translator selected the first six parts of Chapter One for translation and made studies on the strategies and method applied in translating a biography.Herman Melville is considered one of the greatest novelists in America whose famous works include Redburn, Moby Dick and Billy Budd Sailor. It is significant to learn about the life experience of Melville with a deep insight for it is what that builds Melville a writer. The translator searched in CNKI and other database on the Internet and found several biographies about Melville:but only a few of them have been translated into Chinese in spite of the fact that there are a great number of academic papers and books on his works. This biography about Melville by Lewis Mumford has not been put into Chinese since its publication. This book records the life experience of the great litterateur with trustful words and vivid description, which is a good reference book for studying Melville’s writing career. Therefore, the translation of this book is meaningful.The translator has chosen the first six parts of Chapter One for translation and summed up the problems occurred during the translation of a biography. During the translation, one of the most obvious features of a biography the translator found out is that it is an informative text with literary presentation. The translator should pay attention to the translation of long sentences in the original text, which should be clear and cultured. Therefore, with the guidance of the "functional equivalence" proposed by Eugene A. Nida, the translator applied translating strategies to her translation flexibly and elaborated on representing the meaning and rhetoric of the original text.