A Translation Report On Letter To My Daughter(Excerpt)

This thesis is a report on English-Chinese translation,including text analysis and translation.The translation part is selected from Letter to My Daughter,which is the third book written by African-American writer Maya Angelou.Chapter One to Chapter Nine of this book are chosen as the study objects.The original text belongs to expressive text with a strong feminist feature.The report is directed by Skopos theory,which contains three rules:skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule.It stresses that the translation purposes decide translation methods.Under the guidance of it,the translator agilely uses translation strategies to handle the translation problems from lexical,structural and cultural levels.The translation strategies selected in this paper include literal translation,free translation,sequential translation,inverse translation,adding footnotes,etc.The translator manages to achieve an accurate,smooth translation with an original style.This report is composed of five chapters.The first chapter is an introduction,which conducts the basic information of Letter to My Daughter and its author;the second chapter describes three translation processes that combines pre-translation,in-translation and after-translation management;the third chapter centers on Skopos theory as the theoretical framework,including a detailed description of the theory and its direction to translation;the fourth chapter,being the main part of this report,exemplifies the translation process under the guidance of Skopos theory;a conclusion is made based on the experience of this translation report in the last chapterFrom the whole translation process,the translator realizes that translation is not just a language conversion.The translator should also take several factors such as social backgrounds,language features,cultural differences into consideration.Moreover,the translator needs to respect the original work to have appropriate artistic creations,making the reader enjoy the similar reading experience as source text readers.