An E-C Translation Report Of The Ghost At The Wedding(Excerpts)

This is an English-Chinese translation report,and the source text is selected from a war memoir,The Ghost at the Wedding(chapters 8-11)by an Australian writer Shirley Walker.Taking war as its background,the author of this work mainly regards the life experience of the protagonists Eddie and Joe as its main line,and the spiritual journey of Jessie alone at home as subline.From an Australian’s perspective,the author records the sufferings and torment brought by the First World War,and depicts a touching tragic love story as well.In addition to the introduction of the background of the translation project,structure of the report and the translation process,this translation report attaches great emphasis on analyzing difficulties during the translation process and corresponding translation methods when tackling these difficulties on lexical and syntactic level as well as figures of speech.At lexical level,literal translation with notes is used to translate culture-loaded words to help readers to understand the source text well.In translation of some rare proper nouns,both transliteration and annotation are adopted.Choosing words’ meaning is applied to deal with polysemy,and conversing parts of speech to the translation of prepositions and prepositional phrases.At syntactic level,due to the great differences existing between Chinese and English,inanimate-subject sentences in English should be transformed to animate-subject ones in Chinese,and passive voice should be conversed to active voice during the translation process so as to make the translation faithful to the original text.Attributive clauses are translated under the principle of post-modifiers and division as well.Besides,free from sentences structure of the original text,other types of sentences like adverbial clauses can be translated by the methods such as division and reinventing sentence structure.As for figures of speech,some translation methods,such as literal translation,replacement aswell as free translation are adopted in the translation of simile,metaphor and hyperbole so as to make the Chinese version more vivid and colorful to add more original flavor.Through this translation practice,the translator’s ability from English and Chinese has been improved.In addition,the translation of this book restores the real scenario of the First World War,which helps readers to further understand the culture and history of Australia.Finally,it is hoped to further aid the readers to study Australian literature and give reference to other translators who aspire to translate this category of literature.