A Report Of The Translation Of American Boy(Chapters 1-10)

This is a report based on the translation of the first ten chapters of Larry Watson’s American Boy.The source text is 29,000 words,and the Chinese characters are counted as 51,000 when it is translated into Chinese.In this autobiographical novel,Larry Watson records snatches of his teenager life based on the protagonist who is modeled on the author himself.It turns the pages of American small-town life in the 1960 s to the target readers through both simple and unadorned language.The source text attracts scores of American readers not only because of the personal experience of the protagonist Mathew Garth,a necessitous teenager from a single-parent family,but also his entanglement with the Dunbar family as an outsider concerning a young woman named Luisa Lindahl.Through a thorough investigation,it is found that this work has not been translated into Chinese yet for the time being,and this expounds the majority of Chinese readers’ inaccess towards it.Unneglectable as it is,the discrepancies between Chinese and English constitute crucial and difficult points in translation.On the lexical level,one difficulty is the diction or the use of a word in different contexts,and how to find its corresponding counterpart in Chinese.On the syntactic level,more often than not,the differences rather than the similarities between English and Chinese are the crucial points for a flexible adjustment of structuring in Chinese.This is especially evident both in complex and compound sentences considering that English is featured by time-space distinction,while time and space are conflated in Chinese.Due to the familiarization of some popular coursebooks for English-Chinese translation,more than ten commonly-used translation skills are employed to overturn the obstacles encountered all the while through the translation process.These skills are diction,annotation,amplification,omission,reduplicated words in translation,onomatopoeic words in translation,skills with perspective shift,skills with negative structures,skills with passive voice,skills with four-character Chinese phrases,as well as skills with English set phrase respectively.In this report,33 cases are elaborately selected for both detailed analyses and exemplification of how these skills are adopted in specific situations.Having acquired the aforementioned eleven commonly-used translation skills,the translation task was finished successfully for the most part.Nonetheless,dialogues are haunted here and there all the while in the process of translation,which remains a nuisance hard to be dealt with.The dialogue,as an indispensable part of literary works,is strongly communicative.In light of both its text feature and high frequency of occurrence,resorting to Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory is needed for a better solution to this unintelligible hard nut.According to this theory,the use of language is a continuous choice-making process concerning various aspects of context for adaptation.The communicative context,composed of the physical world,the mental world and the social world,together with the identities of the parties involved in a conversation goes a long way towards the interpretation of dialogue translation.Correspondingly,twelve dialogues among multitudinous characters are excerpted for analyses from these four perspectives respectively.Equipped with such a theory,the translation of dialogues in this novel is not only more in conformity with the characteristics of the protagonists but also the thinking mode of the Chinese readers,the translation quality of which is relatively satisfying.The report is composed of five chapters.Chapter one is a description of this translation task,which includes an introduction to the source of the text,the main plot and the author,the motivation for the translation as well as the structure of the report.The second chapter gives a general description of the translation process,including the pre-translation preparation,while-translation procedure and proofreading.In the next chapter,more than ten commonly-used translation skills are employed for case analyses.Chapter four centers on the dialogue translation of novels from the perspective of communicative context.Under the guidance of the Adaptation Theory,the target text is consistently in line with the Chinese expression to a greater extent.The last chapter summarizes the reflections,the limitations and the suggestions for future translation practice respectively.