A Report On The Translation Of Funny Little Snake

This is a practice report on English-Chinese translation of a short story--Funny Little Snake.The story,written by Tessa Hadley,was first published in the Fiction column of The New Yorker in 2017.Up to now,there haven,t been any Chinese versions.Tessa Hadley is a famous English scholar and writer and often offers novels for The New Yorker.Her works generally focus on family life,which arouses the translator’s interest.Thus,Funny Little Snake is chosen as the material for this translation practice.In the story,there are few characters with distinctive personalities due to their ages,the different social classes and the complex family and social life.This report will mainly analyze the dialogues in the story and discuss how to represent the characters and their personalities through accurate dialogue translation.As an important literature genre,fiction often reflects social life through describing characters,plot and environment,and creating vivid characters is the central task.Character description generally includes psychological description,action description,appearance description and expression description.However,the characters can also be depicted through dialogues.During the translation,how to help the target language readers with different cultural background get the same perception of the characters and their personalities in the source text is the key challenge.To resolve this challenge,the "three-consistence" principle put forward by Professor Huang Fenbao(2000)is chosen as the guidance--the dialogues in the target text are in consistent with the characters’ role and status,personality and the particular situation in the source text.And the translator make use of literal translation,free translation,conversion to proper noun,addition of the first-person pronoun,using modal particles and transformation of punctuation to translate the dialogues appropriately and reproduce the characters’ image and personalities in the source text accurately.