A Report On The Translation Of Chapter 14 And 15 Of Station Eleven

Station Eleven, a novel written by Emily St. John Mandel, originally published by Afred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2014, tells a story of an epidemic that wipes out civilization. This novel intersects two timelines. One is set in Year Twenty after the “Georgia Flu” has hit the city Toronto. A Traveling Symphony, composed of a group of actors and musicians, performs in the ruin land and brings Shakespeare and classical music to the isolated survivors. The other is fragments that happen before this catastrophe arrives. Some flashbacks about the protagonist Arthur who is an actor, and his friend Jeevan are mentioned. In the novel, Mandel wants to explore the strength of memories and human's need for cultures and arts, which is sublimation of the theme of this novel—“Survival is insufficient.” Andrew M Butler, Chair of Sir Arthur Charles Clarke judges, said:“ While many post-apocalypse novels focus on the survival of humanity, Station Eleven focuses instead on the survival of our culture.”The translation material here is literary in nature, which is unavoidably influenced by the culture because a language is the carrier of its culture. Cultural differences lying behind the linguistic differences are the main problems that need to be solved in translation. Literary language is ambiguous, which brings more difficulties to translation. This report analyzes linguistic and syntactic features of the source language in translation and points out some difficulties brought by them. Then, through case studies, this report researches and explores those difficulties and gives relative solutions. In the end, this report points out some limitations in this translation. The whole translation is guided by Skopos theory. It takes skopos rule as the leading one and at the same time also follows both coherence rule and fidelity rule. Under the guidance of Skopos theory, the author, the translator and target readers are closely integrated, which better presents the communicative function and faithfully expresses the real purpose of source language.