A Report On The Translation Of Songs Of Blood And Sword (Chapter4)

The author of this thesis analyzed the methods of the memoir translation based on the forth chapter of Songs of Blood and Sword,which is written by Fatima Murtaza Bhutto,a Pakistani writer,born in 1982.She is the granddaughter of Prime Minister Zulfikar,niece of Prime Minister Benazir and the daughter of Murtaza.The writer of this book recalls the life of her families and their political activities in a background of the corrupt,cruel political power of Pakistan,which caused the brutal death of her families.The language of this source text is simple and plain characterized by authenticity and literariness.Also the source text inclines to boast informative function.So,in the process of this translation,the translator not only should be faithful to the original text,but also ensure the language is fluent.And the communicative and semantic translation theory which is put forward by Peter Newmark,a famous British translation theorist,have given much helpful guidance for this translation practice.This article is an English-Chinese translation practice report.It not only introduces the process of this project,but also discusses the theoretical guidance of the communicative and semantic translation from the aspects of vocabulary,syntax and discourse coherence.Using the case analysis,the author of this report comes up with six translation strategies to solve the problems encountered during the translation: transforming the narrative subject to enhance the coherence;adding meaning of some vocabularies appropriately to highlight the intention of the original writer;Flexibly shifting the part of speech to make the translation smoother;Reasonably restructuring sentences to avoid too many adjectives just for one noun;transforming the voice of the sentence to comply with the expression of the target language.Through this translation report,the author of this thesis probed into the application of the communicative translation and semantic translation theory in the memoir and showed the analysis the translator does for this theory,in the hope that it can benefit the future related scholars and readers.