A Report On The Translation Of A House Of My Own—Stories From My Life

A House of My Own—Stories from My Life is written by Sandra Cisneros,one of the most influential Chicana female writers.It is characteristic of Chicano literature to be filled with polyphonic narration,fragmental narration,fictional autobiography and epistolary narrative writing methods.This translation report focuses on the English to Chinese translation of A House of My Own—Stories from My Life from the perspectives of language and culture.The translation process has effectively applied two translation strategies of foreignization and domestication to make the target text well represent the original style,effectively convey the original writing intentions and fully preserve the original foreign cultural characteristics in the literary translation.At the language level,domestication covers the lexical,syntactic and stylistic aspects.In the lexical aspect,the translator mainly analyses the adoption of four-character idioms and the proper word choices by free translation to make the translation text full of rhythmic beauty and readability for the target readers.In the syntactic aspect,passive voice and readjustment of the sentence are utilized in order to ensure the fluency and effective expression of the author’s intentions and connotation.With regard to the rhetorical aspect,puns and parallelism are the key issues during the translation.On the regard of rhetorical aspect,puns and parallelism are the key issues during the translation on convey the writer’s ideas to the target readers.Meanwhile,foreignization is applied at the cultural level,including four cultural elements—alien words,allusions,food names,and associations.They are adopted to retain the literary features of the original text,provide readers with the content of an exotic culture and enhance the cross-cultural communication between two peoples and their respective cultures.In the translation process,the two strategies have been complementarily applied to get the optimal effect on the target reader.