A Report On English-Chinese Translation Of Henry Lawson's Short Stories

Henry Lawson,hailed as the founding father of Australian literature,is known for his short stories.He deliberately varies Standard English in the process of recording bushmen's conversations and some narration in his writings so as to vividly and authentically indicate the way these characters speak,creating the uniqueness of dialect usage with both national and realistic features.Research into English dialect is more focused on other aspects than on its translation into Chinese.As for investigations into the translation,scholars in this field mostly provide general translation principles and strategies.However,these suggestions can hardly apply to all translation cases.The purpose of this report is to explore what existent translation methods are suitable for translating the dialect in Lawson's stories and what other methods are possible on the basis of translation review,translation thoughts and case study.Based on the study of cases extracted from five short stories that Lawson writes,this report aims to illustrate how the chosen dialect can be translated by applying footnotes,paraphrases,colloquialisms and synonyms.With these methods employed,the style of the source text can be reflected and the language purity of the target text can be obtained to the largest extent in translation.In terms of translation theory,the report mainly refers to Jiri Levy's translation ideas,the Minimax Strategy in particular.This proves the possibility of adopting the theory in dialect translation.It would be great that the report can benefit research on dialect translation from English into Chinese.