A Report On E-C Translation Of The Spy Within(Excerpt)

The Spy Within(2008)is a spy novel written by Tod Hoffman,a Canadian staff writer and former intelligence officer.It is a documentary novel which mainly presents the whole story of FBI investigation against,identification,arrest and trial of the spy suspect Larry Chin,a former CIA employee,one of the most significant cases in the history of espionage.Currently,there is no Chinese version of the book.Out of his personal interest in espionage and counter-espionage activities,the author chose to translate this novel independently in Chinese of more than 187,700 wordsThis report is based on translation of three chapters from this novel,namely,The Preliminaries(Chapter 7),The End(Chapter 9),and The Visit(Chapter 10).This part mainly deals with the pretrial defense in the court session and Larry Chin's suicide plot.The source text is difficult in language,with a large number of legal terms,involving trial defense,psychological description and other plots.The main difficulties in this translation practice are how to thoroughly understand the principles,framework and procedures of the litigation law of Anglo-American law system and translate these technical terms and descriptive sentences with accuracy and fluency.Referring to the commonly used translation methods and techniques,the author of this report proposes its own solutions by analyzing the typical problems in translation practice.At the lexical level,this paper discusses the translation of technical terms and the use of common translation techniques such as addition and conversion in English-Chinese translation.At the syntactic level,this paper discusses the application of the usual translation techniques,such as the techniques of division,voice change and inversion.By summarizing the major findings and limitations of the project,the author hopes that some suggestions he proposed will be of some help to the other translators of detective stories.