A Report On The Translation Of Prairie Fires(Excerpts)

This report is based on an English-Chinese translation of Prairie Fires(excerpts),a masterwork of Caroline Fraser,which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018.This book depicts the social vicissitudes of the United States and the arduous life of Laura over the past century,as well as the poverty,pain,disaster,famine,and turmoil experienced by the Laura family of pioneer life.Adaptation theory is a linguistic theory proposed in Understanding Pragmatics by Jef Verschueren in 1999.This theory comprehensively explains language use and language phenomenon from cognitive,social,and cultural aspects.According to adaptation theory,language users constantly make choices from the aspects of communicative context and language structure,which can be regarded as a process of making multiple choices based on different levels of consciousness to meet communicative requirements.The process of the choice-making is made sense by three properties of language,namely,variability,negotiability,and adaptability.Among them,adaptability is the most crucial notion.Based on the previous research on the theory of adaptation theory and the translation practice,if the source text can have the highest mapping on the translation,translators should adapt to the target language and the source language dynamically.And,adaptation to the target language aims at resonating with the author of the source text maximum from the perspective of the reader.Adaptation to the source language aims at being faithful to the source language and the original author.Under the guidance of the theory of linguistic adaptation,the author has completed the translation project of Prairie Fires(excerpts).From the perspective of language structure and communicative context,this report illustrates how the translator adapts to the cognitive context of English and Chinese and generates the target text dynamically so that the target text can achieve the accurate transmission of the original content to the greatest extent and reproduce language features and cultural context.Prairie Fires is of high literary value,which requires the translator to be faithful to the source text and expand the context to accurately convey the source information to the greatest extent,and make the target readers get the pleasure of reading literature.Therefore,this report serves as a significant challenge to the translator.Through this translation practice,as far as literary texts are concerned,the author concludes that translators need to compensate the gap information of the source context and structural object based on understanding the source text.Then,the translator needs to choose the appropriate translation strategy from the perspective of the target reader and expand the context and structure of the translation so that the readers can resonate with the author of the source text to the greatest extent.This report is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is an overview of this task,including the background of the practice and theory,a brief introduction to the author,the source text as well as the purpose and structure of this task.The second chapter gives a description of the translation process.The third chapter is an introduction to the theoretical basis and some fundamental notions,as well as its application and the analyzing model in literary translation.The fourth chapter explains how the adaptation theory handles the problems encountered in translation with some detailed case analyses from the structural object and communicative contexts.The fifth chapter serves as a conclusion that briefly summarizes the whole report and states the gains and limitations.