A Translation Project Report On American Street(Excerpts)

Culture is a broad and complex concept.A thousand colors of culture may be derived for different regions,groups and times,and cultural blending is what all the countries in the world must face today.The present thesis is a report of a translation project intended to promote cultural inclusion.The source text is selected from American Street,the first book of Ibi Zoboi who is an American writer of Haitian descendant.This book draws on its author's personal experience,telling a story about how the heroine adapts to American life with the help of her aunt and sisters after losing connection with her mother upon entering the United States.The selected excerpts of the book focus on the experience of the heroine when she first arrived,a key part of cultural collision.The translator has encountered two major types of problems in the process of translation:1.The language of the source text is relatively curt.In addition,there are a lot of colloquial words which need to be handled properly;2.Dialogues have taken a large proportion of the book,so the translator has to choose corresponding methods of translation in accordance with the features of characters;3.The style of the source text is not united for that there are several parts like lyrics and little psychological stories which are much different from the main style.The process of translation is guided by the functional equivalence theory of Eugene A.Nida.The translator has adopted translation strategies such as amplification,omission and sentence-split translation for specific problems.In terms of genre,the source text is positioned as teenagers' book.In order to suit the tastes of the target readers,the translator uses rhetorical devices such as metaphor and hyperbole in the process of translation.As for sentence pattern,the source text often uses short sentences,so the translator renders it in a way as concise as possible.Especially,the translation of lyrics is the best example of sentence equivalence.In the aspect of word selection,as there are many slangs in the book due to black culture,the translator adopts assimilative translation strategy by selecting popular words of young people nowadays in China so that the translation is more acceptable to the target group.Through this project,the author has realized the cultural weight carried by translation,and become more aware of the great significance of translation as a bridge.It is hoped that the civilization of the human world can be integrated and long standing with the help of translation.