A Report On The Translation Of City Of Illusions

This is a report on the translation of City of Illusions which has not been officially published in Chinese at present. The story takes place on Earth, also known as Terra, in the future, twelve hundred years after an enemy named the Shing has broken the power of the League of All Worlds and occupied Earth. The indigenous people of Earth have been reduced in numbers and widely separated, living in highly independent rural community or nomadic tribal societies. The protagonist is a naked man without any memory who comes to a small community in a forest area and lives there. Later against all odds, the man finally finds his identity back and succeeds in bringing freedom to the Earth.This report mainly analyzes the translation of chapter one and two of this novel,and the translator designs this report in four parts. In the first part, she introduces the writer’s life, the social attention and the synopsis of this novel, and also states her own incentives of writing the translation report of this novel. This part can help the readers have preliminary cognition of this novel and the report. The second part is about some essential preparations before translating and the process of proofreading after translating. The emphasis of the whole report is the third part which describes the theoretical basis of translating and presents the translator’s translation strategy on the lexical and the syntactic level in detail. During translating, the translator was always on the basis of the Skopos Theory of which the core viewpoint is “the end justifies the means”(Reiss and Vermeer 1984, cited in Munday 2010). In the last part, the translator analyses her own enlightenment gained from translating and deficiencies of translating still existed, and lists several suggestions for the translators. The translator’s purpose is to offer a translated literary work in target language with high readability, so she has to put the target readers in the first place. In this case, the translator uses mostly the strategy of re-creation which is the highlight of this report.In the translating process, the translator found that she should try her best to improve own imagination and take full advantage of the translation strategy,re-creation, when translating science fiction filled with creativity. Besides, the method of translating a same type of content is not constant. For instance, translator shouldtake character and place names’ connotative meanings into consideration, instead of simply transliterating them according to their pronunciation.