A Report On The Translation Of All Fall Down( Excerpt )

This is a report on the translation of All Fall Down, which has not been translated into Chinese yet. All Fall Down is a story of a woman‘s slipping into drug addiction and struggling to kick the habit. In this report I described how to choose different translation strategies from the perspective of relevance theory.Although the initial purpose of relevance theory is not to account for translation, it provides a reasonable and unified theoretical framework for translation studies. According to relevance theory, translation is an interlingual communication as well as an inferential cognitive process. The primary task for translators is to recreate optimal relevance of the source text, which is to obtain the adequate contextual effects intended by the source communicator with the lowest possible processing effort on the part of the target receptor. Relevance theory explains how translation works. It does not constitute or advocate a particular way of translating. The selection of translation strategies should be guided by the search of optimal relevance to benefit the target reader.This report consists of five Chapters. Chapter one begins with a description of the translation task. Chapter two introduces the process of the translation including the preparation before translation, the translation schedule and the proofreading after translation. Chapter three introduces the framework of relevance theory. In Chapter four I present the problems and difficulties of translating the novel from two levels—word translation and sentence translation—and elaborate on how the theory directs the translation. The conclusion Chapter summarizes the study problems and inspiration during the process of translation.