An English-Chinese Translation Report On Defectors(Chapters 1-2)

With the rapid development of economic globalization and the acceleration of cultural communication,translation has becoming increasingly important.Novel can not only easily attract the interest of readers but also help them better understand the western culture and life in a different perspective for its fascinating plots,exquisite details and vivid languages.Through the translation of excellent novel,the translator can further understand related translation theory and skills,and the writing style and skills of novel as well.The source text is selected from the latest bestseller Defectors written by famous American novelist Joseph Kanon.Through the story of two brothers about a memoir,this book reveals the plight of the spies who betrayed their country for their belief.The selected text is interesting to read but hard to translate.Firstly,this is a novel with many characters and complex relationship;moreover,the wide use of colloquial language increases the difficulty to reproduce the information in target language with its original style;thirdly,both the long and complicated sentences which are hard to analyze and the broken short sentences without complete information are used extensively here;fourthly,the cultural terminologies and loanwords from Russia and other countries have set the translator a higher demand;the last,the author employed the stream-of-consciousness technique in this novel.A great leap of time and space that results in the omission of the content and the improper analysis of tense will cause serious misunderstanding of the historical background.The translator chooses the functional equivalence as the foundation of translation theory,uses the translation methods and footnotes flexibly to realize the equivalence at lexical,syntactical and textual levels.After the thorough study and application of functional equivalence theory during the translation,the translator deepens the understanding of this theory,tests her skills,finds out the weaknesses and strengthens the translation ability.Besides,the report which analyzes the difficulties under the guidance of functional equivalence theory may provide new insight or references to the related studies on the similar difficulties in future.