Report On Translation Of The Handmaid's Tale(Excerpt)

The Handmaid's Tale is a representative work of Canadian contemporary writer Margaret Atwood and one of the most classic fantasy novels of the 20th century.It is a futuristic novel with varied themes based upon a vivid description of the social reality.It reflects the authoritarian regimes' persecution of human beings and the stifling of human nature as well as some other issues about which our modern society shares a common concern,like the social environment problem,ecology and feminism.In addition to the reality and diverse theme it has,the work is also quite novel in writing techniques which is of a great educational value and has a worldwide influence.Published in 1985,the novel was translated into Chinese by Chen Xiaowei in2009.As an MTI student,the author of this report re-translated the work,and,based on it,made an analysis of the difficulties she had and the solutions she adopted in the translation process.The purpose is to find out her own shortcomings and deficiencies in translation.This report is an analysis and summary of the translation methods the author adopted to solve the difficulties she confronted in translating.The translation practice is divided into three stages:pre-translation preparation,translation process and post-translational revision.In pre-translation preparation,the author read the original novel to try to understand its theme,writing techniques and stylistic features.Meanwhile,the author read some works on translation theories and finds out some reliable translation aids to ensure the translation quality.In the translation process,the author confronted some difficulties in translating and tackled them with various methods and strategies.The main difficulties and solutions in translation are as follows:First,there are not only numerous personal names and culture-loaded words from the Bible but also novel words Margret Atwood created in the novel,and in order to have a good understanding of them,the author consulted some related books and online resources to determine their meanings.Second,there are a large number of special sentences in the novel,such as parallels,ellipsis and attributive,and the author adopted such translation methods comprehensively as repetition,supplementation and pre-position and post-position to deal with all kinds of difficult sentences.At the stage of post-translation,the author read the draft translation carefully to find out whether there was any important information omitted.Besides,through a careful comparison with Chen's translation,the author found out some mistakes in her draft and polished her own translation both at the lexical and syntactical levels.Through the translation of the novel,the author has improved her own translation competence and has a deeper understanding of the charm of literary translation.Meanwhile,she has realized that there are still a lot of shortcomings and deficiencies in her translation and a long way to go if she wishes to be a competent translator.In particular,her careful revision and polishing of the draft with a close reference to Chen's translation enables her to achieve the purpose of improving her translation competence in a large degree.