| This is a report on the translation of an excerpt from the novel All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, an excellent American author. It was published by Scribner on May 6, 2014 and won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It tells a story of a French girl, Marie-Laure, and a German boy, Werner Pfennig, whose lives converge through various setbacks and hardships. It aims to demonstrate the importance of optimistic spirits in hard times. Composed of short chapters, it is reader-friendly and features a detailed description of the psychological activities and natural scenes as well as gorgeous metaphors.In the process of translation, phenomena of non-equivalence appear due to cultural, linguistic as well as historical differences. Mona Baker’s Bottom-up Discourse Analysis Model provides the translator with abundant resources of translation strategies and techniques for achieving equivalence in a comprehensive manner: at lexical, grammatical, textual and pragmatic levels for a better expressive and rendering effect of the translated text.Furthermore, context is a most significant factor in understanding, translation and expression. During the translating process, every word, especially those in a vital position, is deliberated on and native speakers and dictionaries are resorted to in terms of culture-specific expressions including typical social phenomena and specific names. On the basis of the sound knowledge of grammar and the interpretation of syntactic structures, the translator has applied various translation techniques in order to achieve an acceptable, cohesive and coherent translated version and adequately convey its implied meanings as well as rhetorical and cultural senses.Through this task, the translator hopes to introduce this masterpiece to Chinese readers. In addition, this translation task offered the translator a valuable opportunity to practice translating, which has considerably enhanced her knowledge and skills of translation. |
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