A Report On The Translation Of History Of Wolves(Excerpts)

In this translation report,the translator takes the first four chapters of the novel History of Wolves written by the American novelist Emily Fridlund as the translation material to carry out the translation practice.The novel tells a story about a 14-year-old girl,who begins to explore the adult world.The whole novel is narrated in the first person and the language of the novel is subtle and poetic.In the translation report,the translator mainly discusses the difficulties encountered and solutions adopted in the translation process from the perspectives of words,sentences and texts.On the lexical level,the translator uses the translation theories and procedures proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet(1995)to guide the translation practice.Given to the preference in the usage of parts of speech,the differences in lexical meaning and their morphological changes,the translator adopts procedures such as borrowing,transposition,modulation and explicitation to make the translation more in line with Chinese.On the syntactic level,the translator mainly applies the three-stage translation system proposed by Nida(1969).The translator firstly back-transforms the complex surface structure of a sentence into its deep structure(kernel sentences),and then adjusts the kernel sentences according to the language habits of Chinese.The translator adopts the translation method to make the message of the source language clearer,reduces the subjectivity in translation and increases the rationality of adjusting the statement structures of the source sentence.On the textual level,the translator implements Halliday and Hasan’s(1976)theories on cohesion and coherence.By doing so,the translator realizes that grammatical cohesion is more prominent in English.Lexical cohesion in Chinese,however,tends to be more prominent.In translation,the translator changes the cohesion devices in the source language so as to ensure the consistency of the translated text.Through the practice of translation,the translator finds that the application of translation theories cannot be isolated.They serve the task of translation together and help the translator to understand and express the original text accurately and properly.The translation theories and procedures discussed in this report are applied in the translator’s translation practice.Although there is still room for improvement,it is also an active trial of combining the theory with practice,and the related experience has an effective guiding role in translation practice.