A Report On The Translation Of The Return: Fathers,Sons And The Land In Between (Excerpts)

This report is based on the translation of chapter one to chapter five in The Return: Fathers,Sons and the Land in Between,a novel by Hisham Matar.The translation is aimed to expose more Chinese readers to Arab culture and the history of Libya,the official literature of which had always been in Qaddafi’s hands before his death.The Return is a true recollection of and a reflection on the political and social conditions in Libya in the past forty years,which is conducive to further researches.Therefore,The Return is selected as the source text of the translation task.The report is under the guidance of Eco-translatology which was put forward by Hu Gengshen in 2001.Eco-translatology can be understood as “translation studies from an ecological perspective”.Its premises are “the relevance chain”,“the similarity and isomorphism of translational ecology and natural ecology” and “the approach to translation as adaptation and selection”,which highlight the connection and interactivity between translation activities and nature.The translation strategy of Eco-translatology can be summarized as “three-dimensional transformations”,namely,the linguistic,the cultural and the communicative dimensional transformations.The adaptive transformation from the linguistic dimension refers to translators’ adaptive selection transformation of the language form which is implemented in different aspects and levels.The adaptive transformation from the cultural dimension refers to translators’ concentration on the transmission and interpretation of the bilingual cultures.The adaptive transformation from the communicative dimension is that translators should put emphasis on the communicative aspect and check whether the communicative intention in the source text is fully achieved in the target text.Eco-translatology offers a comprehensive perspective and strongly explains the elements of linguistic,cultural and communicative aspects,which is applicable to literary translation.In this report,the translator attempts to take Eco-translatology as the guiding theory,so as to resolve the difficulties in the translation from the perspective of the three-dimensional transformations,such as cultural conflicts,the shape of characters,monologue,the analysis of complex sentences,etc.The report is divided into five parts.The first chapter is an introduction to the translation task.The second chapter gives a description of the translation process and points out the difficulties in the process of translation and the solutions.The third chapter is the theoretical framework which specifies the theory of Eco-translatology and interprets its related concepts.The fourth chapter is an essential one,in which the translation of The Return will be analyzed in detail under the guidance of Eco-translatology,more specifically,of the three-dimensional transformations.The last chapter is the conclusion of the report with translation experience and limitations being shown.