A Report On The Translation Of Short Stories By John McGahern

John McGahern (12 November 1934--30 March 2006) was one of the most famous writers in Ireland. The Guardian once evaluated him as the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett. And he was continually called "the Irish Chekov" for his unparalleled talent on short stories. "The Beginning of an Idea" and "Like all other men" were selected from The Collected Stories(1992), which share McGahern’s pervasive theme:the failure of love affairs and the confusions of their lives. The translation of dialogues which occupy more than 50% of the whole plays a pivotal role in these two stories, while the difficulty in translating love scene description is well known to the public. Translation is a kind of communication which always occurs in a certain context. Context influences how a word is to be understood, how it is to be translated. Context should be taken into consideration during translation process.On the basis of the context theory, this thesis probes into the translation of dialogues and love scene description in short stories by John McGahern, focusing on the influence of intra-linguistic context and extra-linguistic context on translation for translation and context are closely connected. And the contextual analysis focus on these two aspects. Thus flexible translation methods are used to solve translation difficulties in order to achieve a better translated text that combines the understanding of the source language (SL) under the original context and the better representation in target language (TL) under TL context.This report mainly includes four chapters. In Chapter One, the translation project will be introduced, which contains the brief introduction of the author and his short stories, The characteristics of short stories and The source language texts analysis. In Chapter Two, the theory of context will be introduced as well as the studies on context and translation. In Chapter Three, the case studies of the influence of context on dialogue translation and love scene description translation will be discussed. In Chapter Four, the conclusion will be summarized.