A Report On Translating Dialogues In The Novel Supreme Justice(Excerpts)

This is a translation report.The source text of the report is selected from Supreme Justice written by Gary Hardwick.The fiction mainly tells a murder mystery.To pursue justice,Marshall Jackson,a young black U.S.attorney spares no effort to investigate the murder case of a Supreme Court justice Farrell Douglas.In the novel Supreme Justice,there are many dialogues.Formally,dialogues in a novel are short but meaningful,informal but vivid;functionally,dialogues reveal speakers’ images and characteristics,thus helping readers know the plots of the story.Not only can dialogue reflect the written skills of an author,but also it can reflect the translation skills of the translator.In the translation process,there are three main problems to be dealt with:(1)How to grasp the meaning of words in dialogues;(2)How to reproduce dialogue features;(3)How to make target language readers feel that the translated text is natural as the original one.In order to solve these three problems,the translator has taken three translation methods respectively.Firstly,the translator grasps the authentic meaning of dialogues according to the context.Secondly,the translator reproduces different features of different dialogues by analyzing different speakers’ social identities.Finally,in order to make the target text more natural,the translator has made some adjustments in translation in line with the target language readers’ habits.Dialogue translation offers the translator good opportunities to have a more in-depth knowledge of dialogues and improve the translator’s translation skills.Above all,by this translation practice,the translator hopes to make target language readers enjoy the novel just like source language readers do and to some extent,give other translators some inspiration in dialogues translation.