A Report On The Translation Of Wait For The Rain (Chapters 1-3)

The project is on the translation of Wait for the Rain written by Maria Murnane, an American woman writer. The novel tells a story about a divorced woman —— Daphne. She is distraught at everything after divorce, but later, on a reunion journey with her long separated soul-mates, she gradually bounces back and starts to lead a new life.It is found that the source text is characterized by a lot of psychological descriptions and dialogues. Psychological descriptions express the delicate emotion of the protagonist and reveal his strong mental agony. As to the features of dialogues, the language is not so formal and grammatical, containing many ellipses. What’s more, the novel employs the approach of narration interspersed with flashbacks. Many things and details are presented through the character’s psychological activities. Therefore, on the one hand, the translator should focus on the recurrence of the character’s strong emotions and feelings in the target language. On the other hand, the translator must use some devices to realize the contextual cohesion and coherence in the target language. Since the translation of literary text is based on understanding and elucidation, the author decides to apply the translation theory of hermeneutic motion proposed by George Steiner. The hermeneutic motion is composed of four steps —— trust, aggression, incorporation and restitution. In the translation practice, the author mainly focuses on the fourth step. Based on the differences between Chinese and English, the author applies some restitution approaches. Specifically, they are reflected in lexical, syntactical and textual aspect respectively. Through the restitution of means of expression, cultural background and contextual cohesion and coherence, it is expected to achieve the balance between the source text and target text to an extreme.The translation report can be divided into six parts. Firstly, it is the task description,which includes a brief introduction to the translation project, the purpose of this report, the significance of this report and the main components of this report. The second part is the the pre-translation preparation, introducing how the author chooses the source text, the translating tools and translation approaches and makes his translation plan. Next, it is about the translation process which is developed from three aspects, the analysis of the source text, the choosing of the target language and the discussion of important difficult points. The fourth part is the after-translation management, including the determination of revisers and their revising methods. The following part is the case study. And the last part draws a conclusion for the translation report.