A Report On The Translation Of A Cautionary Tale

This report is based on A Cautionary Tale by American writer Deborah Eisenberg.The novel presents an unusually distinctive portrait of contemporary American life,illustrates how protagonist Patty struggles to maintain an unusual friendship.Job,dream and relationship,none of which we can avoid.The most wonderful thing about her novels –from the perspective of the translator – is that it's impossible to guess from sentence to sentence,what might come next.The relationship between life and work involved in this novel is much discussed by American readers,thus the translator believes that it must appeal to Chinese readers,and it deserves translating and recommending.In preparing translation,the translator did a lot of information-collecting work,including a brief overview of the authors' other works,author's background information,analysis of author's personality and writing style,thus to have a better understanding of the source text.During reading,the translator noticed author's outstanding writing style,thus in translating,with the theoretical guidance of Style theory of Liu Miqing,the translator chose Liu's one of three translation strategies reflecting the style of source text,that is Corresponding.For the author of this novel,Deborah Eisenberg,is a writer receiving many awards like Guggenheim Fellowship,O.Henry Awards,MacArthur Fellowship and PEN/Faulkner Award.Eisenberg is a writer who expresses opinions directly and boldly,while her works tend to be less direct.Terse language,short sentences or even stream of consciousness are the features of her work.Therefore,translating such a writer's work can never be easy.During translating,the translator tried to dig out all stylistic markers of the original text,thus translate the original style.At the same time,the translator found that Liu's marker category is not very complete,so there are stylistic expressing forms can't find corresponding categories.When translating these “forms”,the translator still adopted Liu's translating strategy “corresponding”,because the translator wants to present “the same novel written in different languages” to target readers.