A Report On The Translation Of A Boy In Winter(Excerpt)

This report selects the third chapter from A Boy in Winter,an English novel written by British novelist Rachel Eeiffert as the original material for translation.The novel tells a story which happened in a small town of Ukraine in November 1941 when the small town was invaded and occupied by German.At that time,the town was extremely turbulent.Everyone was guessing and worrying about how to make a survival.Rachel Eeiffert develops the story with the description of the five main characters and tells the story of the brutal war from the perspective of Yankel,the eldest son of Emphraim who is the backbone of the whole family.It is believed that the translation of this wartime novel is significant since it can warn readers to cherish peace and maintain peace after they know what the world will be like after the war.The novel is plain and its language is simple,since the story is narrated mainly through the dialogues between the characters,which are mostly short and colloquial.As we all know that there are many differences between Chinese and English such as the habits of expression.Great differences also exist in thought patterns between English and Chinese.And further,there are certain differences between the cultures of China and Jewry.For thousands of years,the Chinese nation has been living in a settled lifestyle in which there are few large-scale migration activities and the scope of daily activities of people is relatively fixed.On the contrary,the Jewish people have lived a migratory life for centuries.So the Jews are psychologically accustomed to this migration.Therefore,it is necessary and rational to take into account the differences between Chinese and Jewish cultures in this translation.Due to the above reasons,some words,phrases or even sentences need to be added in the translation process of this novel from English to Chinese to get the successful cross-cultural communication.In this way,the Chinese version of the novel will be more in line with the habits of expression in the original language,and keep the same steps with the logical thinking of the original text.As a result,amplification,one of the very useful translation skills,is deeply discussed in this report.Some special statements in this novel are selected as the examples to be studied from the amplifying grammatically,logically and rhetorically.And grammatical amplification has been further studied from the aspects of numerals,quantifiers,voice,tense,abstraction and concrete,non-predicate verbs and structural differences.