| Julian Barnes is one of the most popular writers in England and his eleventh novel The Sense of an Ending also won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction which is popular around the world. There are two sections in the best seller. In Part One, it mainly describes the hero’s senior high school and university life which are uneventful but rather dull; in Part Two, an unexpected will from the hero’s ex-girlfriend’s mother completely changes his quiet retired life, which forces him to start to explore all unsolved riddles in his past life and gradually changes the memories he firmly believed during all his life. Eventually, he is surprised to find what was once the convincing memories is now full of uncertainties and the harmless "me" in the memories also becomes blurred. The novel contains plenty of dialogues which obviously have the personal features and characteristics of spoken language. For the personal features, the dialogues not only show the characters’different traits directly, but also well exhibit their psychological states in certain situations. As for the characteristics of spoken language, the dialogues tend to choose everyday language which is common and easy to be understood in terms of the vocabulary, often employ short sentences, compound sentences and elliptical sentences in terms of grammar (but sometime also use complex sentences), and usually use the complementary words in terms of the extemporaneousness, such as "I think", "you see", "well" etc.. Based on the dialogues’characteristics, considering the contexts and habits of the target language, and from the perspective of the sentence and words, the paper employs four methods to translate the dialogues such as using short sentences, omitting subjects, choosing appropriate words and adopting modal particles, which not only makes the translation faithful to the original one and suitable for the habits of the target language, but also could keep both the literariness and readability of the novel. |
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