A Report On The Translation Of Love At Second Sight(Excerpts)

The report is based on the translation of Love at Second Sight, which is written by British female writer Ada Leverson. Love at Second Sight is the third book of the trilogy The Little Ottleys. It is a story about a young lady Edith Ottley’s marriage. It is said that the story is based on Ada Leverson’s own marriage and reflects her point of view on marriage and values.The story has 58,000 words in total. Considering the task’s amount of work, my collaborator and I divide the novel into two parts, and each of us is responsible for a half respectively. According to our plan, the translation task will be done in about half a year, and then we will do self-proofreading and peer proofreading. The polishing will be done according to the suggestions and feedbacks given by target readers.During the translating process, I mainly focus on dealing with the problems caused by the cultural and linguistic differences between the source and target languages, such as the order of words in sentence, the culture-loaded words, and the proper nouns. Peter Newmark’s division of the texts classes literature works as expressive texts, and his semantic translation theory suggests that translators should “...attempt, within the bare syntactic and semantic constraints of the TL, to reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the author”(Newmark, 2004:39). Under the guidance of this theory, I decide to use foreignizing method during the translation process.I wish to have further understanding of the literary translation and improve my translating skills through this project; at the same time, this project may also help me to enhance my literary background and broaden my view. In this translation report, further studies and discussions on features of words and grammar in the novel as well as the applicable translation strategy will be presented.