A Report On The Translation Of Janesville:An American Story(Excerpts)

The winner of Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award,Janesville: An American Story,is written by Amy Goldstein,a senior staff writer at The Washington Post.The writer spent several years immersed in Janesville,Wisconsin where General Motors' plant shut down amid in the Great Recession in 2008 to investigate the influences of the closure.She also looked deep into the fate of workers and their family,local politicians,labor unions and companies.The book explored the question of how the United States in the post-financial crisis era will achieve economic transformation in the new wave of deindustrialization.Unlike other academic works on similar topics,this book not only profoundly touches important policy issues but also makes a humane portrayal of people and their communities.The book contains abundant authentic narration of events and delicate description of the characters' feelings.It is a good book,worthy of being translated.Based on the translation practice of the excerpts of Janesville: An American Story,this report analyzes the difficulties in translating from the aspects of lexicon,syntax and discourse and their corresponding translation theories and strategies.Containing massive proper nouns at the lexical level,using many long and complex sentences at the syntactic level and attaining textual cohesion at the discourse level are the three prominent stylistic features of the book,which also posed challenges for the translator.Thus,this report mainly discusses related translation theories and strategies of these three features,intended to improve the translator's translation skills and shed some light on the translation of similar texts of the same typology.This report consists of four parts,including task description,process description,case study and conclusion.Task description includes the introduction of the book and its author,reasons for the selection of the book and its stylistic features.In the process description part,pre-translation preparations,translation procedure and post-translation quality control are included.In the case study part,the translator illustrates three problems with examples respectively from the aspects of lexicon,syntax and discourse,namely,translation principles and strategies of proper nouns,translation of long and complex sentences under the guidance of Nida's Back-transformation Theory and translation of textual cohesion under the guidance of Halliday and Hasen's theory of cohesive devices.The last part is the conclusion which contains major findings,significance and limitations of the translation and the report,as well as suggestions for further study.