A Translation Report Of Harper Lee’s Novel Go Set A Watchman (Chapters 1-4)

As a translation report, this thesis picks the first 4 chapters as the material of this thesis from the English novel Go Set a Watchman and analyzes the common difficulties in this thesis, as well as translation methods.Go Set a Watchman is a literary fiction, which describes the small town’s life in south of America in 1950s and reveals the values conflicts and strong racial discrimination of American society at that time. The language of this novel is plain and smooth, but consists of complex and long sentences. Much cultural information can be found in this novel.In this thesis, I meet some translation difficulties, such as how to translate words, long sentences and figures of speech. In order to solve these translation difficulties, I adopt Functional Equivalence as the guiding theory. Based on the guidance of the theory, I pick some typical cases and analyze them from the aspects of words, long sentences and figures of speech in different translation methods.The conclusions of this thesis are listed as follows:The literary feature of this novel determines that the translator’s priority is to give target language readers the similar reading experience with the source language readers. In terms of the lexical semantic equivalence, the translator should add the cultural information or choose the proper word’s meaning according to the characteristics of English vocabulary. Considering the equivalence translation of long sentences, the translator should focus on the meaning and spirit of the original rather than being constrained by the language style of the original, so as to achieve the communicative effect. As far as the figures of speech is concerned, the translator should try to keep the language style of the original and completely convey the original literal meaning and metaphorical meaning.