A Report On The Translation Of The Voluntourist (Prologue And Part One)

This paper is a translation report and its selected material is the prologue and the first chapter of The Voluntourist.Its author Ken Budd is a writer and host in America.The Voluntourist is a travel memoir which mainly records the author’s personal experience of being a volunteer in six different countries of the world,along with introspection of family,love,self-exploration and self-discovery.This Memoir is written in lively style,which is full of sincere emotion that is interesting and touching,heart-thrilling and thought-provoking.Since its publication,it has won multiple awards such as the North American Travel Journalist Awards in 2012,Nautilus Book Award in 2013,Lowell Thomas Awards of Thomas American travel writer in 2014.The prologue and the first chapter(New Orleans)have been extracted for the translation practice by the author of this paper.In this part of the contents of the selected text,the author collected and showed a large number of information and materials of Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans.It records and narrates the people and tings during the tour as a volunteer,providing multiple perspective of the serious natural disaster.Moreover it helps the readers to get a better understanding of being a voluntourist.By applying "Three Principles of Translation" by Alexander Fraser Tytler,this report focuses on representation of the idea in the original work and faithful conveyance of the source language message in the translation process of a memoir.This report is divided into the following five parts: The first part is the introduction.It introduces the background information,objectives and significance and so on;the second part is the summary of the source text.It covers the main content of the memoir The Voluntourist,source text analysis;the third part is the description of translation process.It presents the pre-translation arrangement,the theoretical preparation,the translation process and the revision of the translation;the fourth part is the analysis of text translation cases.It makes an analysis on the problems and solutions at vocabulary,sentence structure and discourse level according to the translation process;the fifth part is the summary.It summarizes the experiences and shortcomings of the translation and the problems to be solved.