An English-Chinese Translation Report On Beautiful Liars(Sections 13-17)

At the present time,the speed,breadth and depth of the development of global economic and cultural exchange has reached an unprecedented level.Literary communication plays an essential and prominent role in the increasingly frequent and in-depth cultural communication.The literary translation can enable the target audience to experience different cultures and enhance the communication between different cultures.British fictions have emerged with many excellent works of different types and hold the balance in the world literature,thus it is the preferred choice for translation practice.The translator selects from the excellent works of contemporary British fictions and does translations guided by the certain translation theory with a view to expand his horizons,upgrade his level of translation theories and translation skills and deepen the understanding of contemporary British and western social culture for both the translator and the target audience.The source text is selected from the Beautiful Liars by Isabel Ashdowm,contemporary British novelist,and it is one of the bestsellers in the field of psychological thrillers.The source language text selected for the translation practice is of distinctive British English characteristic,and the overall style of the selected text is popular and simple.However,difficulties still exist in the process of translation.Firstly,in terms of the writing conceptions,suspense is created by "A Death" as the beginning of all three parts of the fiction and alternate view angles of characters.What the translator must pay close attention to is how to grasp the suspense of the original text faithfully and make the readers really sense it throughout the translation process.Secondly,due to a great deal of exquisite psychological descriptions and colloquial character dialogues with distinctive regional and cultural characteristics in the fiction,the translator is required to properly deal with the differences between the source language and the target language in different language environments and cultural backgrounds.Thirdly,the accurate understanding and proper translation of the authentic British English in the source text is a major challenge for the translator,which requires the translator to deal with the great differences between English and Chinese strictly in translation.The last,this translation practice is carried out by two translators in cooperation,which requires the translators to pay attention to the consistency and relevance of translation.In view of the characteristics and difficulties of the translation practice,the translator takes skopos theory as the theoretical guidance.Skopos theory was posed by H.J.Vermeer,famous German translation theorist.The theory is the foundation of functionalist translation theory,which breaks through the limitation of equivalence theory and takes skopos as the first criterion in translation process.Skopos theory deems that translation should follow three principles:Skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule.Among them,the skopos rule is not only the primary rule to determine the translation method,but also the final rule that translation should follow.The translator is required to adopt domestication strategy and comprehensively apply various translation methods and techniques to maximize the reappearance of the source text information at the lexical,syntactic and textual levels.How to correctly apply the guiding theory in the whole process of translation practice and embody it in the translation is also another challenge of the translation practice.Through the translation of contemporary English literary works,the translator has a further cognition of English literature and even western culture;meanwhile,the translator obtains better understanding of skopos theory and more intuitive and comprehensive understanding of the application of various translation methods.Before this practice,the translator was mostly engaged in scientific and technological translation.The practice makes the translator more deeply aware of the different requirements and standards of different types of text translation.Furthermore,it strengthens the translator’s cognition of the whole process of translation project implementation.This will be of great benefit to the translator’s translation work and translation studies in the future.