A Translation Report On H. E. Bates’ Stories

This thesis is a translation report composed on the basis of the translation of two short stories-The Lighthouse and The Mower which are selected from the productive English writer H. E. Bates’ collections of short stories Seven by Five. Bates is one of the popular novelists in the 20th century and many of his works have been adopted on screen. The selected texts were chosen by the author herself. Because after reading the whole book, she realizes that the third novel The Lighthouse and the eleventh The Mower share the same theme. The uniformity of theme will be beneficial to carry out the translation practice.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory proposed by American linguist and translator Eugene Nida, the thesis aims to make the original text and translated text equivalent in semantic and stylistic aspects. It is also aimed at making the source text readers’ response equivalent to that of the target readers. In order to achieve this propose, proper translation strategies and methods are chosen correspondingly in the translating process. In this translation project, the author analyses the translation from lexical, syntactic and textual levels. In the lexical level, the author mainly adopts correspondence, replacement, and conversion as the translation methods so as to achieve the translation goal; in the syntactic level, the author illustrates the simple sentences, complex sentences and long complicated sentences respectively by adopting sequential translation, splitting translation and reconstruction; in the textual level, the author explored the strategies for achieving the textual cohesion and coherence. In accordance with the conciseness of the original text, the author brings the target text’s advantages to make the target language more concise and clear. From the practice, the author realizes that the functional equivalence theory’s requirements of taking source language as the center, trying best to reproduce the original form and content, and stressing on readers’response are of great constructive values to the English-Chinese translation.