A Report On The Translation Of Happiness

This is a report on the translation of the short story—Happiness,which was written by Ron Carlson,initially published in Ecotone and finally won the O.Henry Award.The story not only describes the process of the narrator and his son Nick driving to the family's mountain cabin,but also shows us the American pastoral life.Their whole driving process exhibits scrolls of the fabulous and unique pictures of the western America as well as the memory and emotions about his childhood and married life.Under the unhurried pace of the narration on their tranquil and cozy life implies a kind of imperceptible blues and loneliness between the lines.In the cause of translation,the translator was confronted with miscellaneous obstacles involving considerable geographic knowledge of Utah and Wyoming and details about American culture and daily life.At the same time,there is no doubt that a great deal of route description,driving directions and space distribution of the cabin,highways and interstates and mountain view in the story is a big challenge to the translator who has never been there.In addition,the translator needs to look up words frequently in dictionaries because of polysemy and uncommon meanings of common words the author utilized in the novel.In order to present the whole story ideally and make Chinese readers have similar reading experience to American readers,the translation is based on “text typology theory” from Katharina Reiss,and meanwhile,the translator employed the “domestication” strategy so as to give priority to both semantic and aesthetic needs.The translator hopes that the translation is not merely a story with another language to Chinese readers but also provides an access to distinctive culture and natural landscape of western America.Moreover,it is also expected that the report can be a reference for other translators when they meet similar problems in the process of translating.