A Translation Project Report On How To Disappear:Notes On Invisibility In A Time Of Transparency(Chapter Ⅳ To Chapter Ⅵ)

The source text of this translation practice project is selected from How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency.Akiko Busch,the author of this collection of essays,has worked as a contributing editor in the world-renowned women’s magazine Metropolis for 20 years.Furthermore,her works have constantly appeared in the magazines,newspapers and exhibition catalogue in many countries.The research on invisibility is a sophisticated process,and the subject is exquisite yet elusive.Busch has absorbed various experiences and perceptions standing on the shoulders of many predecessors,and consequently possessed further insights and thoughts based on a wide spectrum of precious researches,insights,suggestions and guidance.The genre of this book falls in the category of social science.In this era abundant with transparency and openness where privacy has nowhere to hide,friendship,happiness of invisibility,concealment of words,concealment of identity,the underlying meaning of self-concealment and the recipe of being unscrambled should be perceived with witty and keen eyes.What this book presents is not only meaningful to exploring the relationship between human and society,but also of great significance to improving the value of individual existence and strengthening the pleasure of enjoying invisibility.There is no published Chinese translation of this book to date.Due to the MTI thesis word limit,the source text for the translation project is excerpted from the fourth to the sixth chapter,namely,“Invisiphilia”,“Invisible Ink " and “At the Identity Spa".It belongs to the type of expressive text,which attaches great significance to the form of text,holds great aesthetic values,focuses on transmitting and rendering the subjective feelings of the author,and harbors splendid imagination.The difficulty in translating this type of text lies in being faithful to both the ideological content of the original text and the linguistic form of the original text,and in accurately transmitting it in a way which is easy to understand and retains the writing style of the original author.Specifically,at the lexical level,the difficulties in translation are mainly reflected in tackling proper nouns with professional background knowledge and handling common nouns in the given context.The writer uses the image search on Google and Wikipedia to find a large number of relevant materials to better understand the background knowledge,fully speculate and study the information the author wants to convey;At the level of sentence pattern,the difficulties in translation are mainly reflected in the processing strategies of passive sentences and ellipsis sentences,the processing of long and difficult sentences with complex logical relations,and the processing of sentences with too long modifying elements of the subject in translation.To address these thorny issues,the writer has carefully studied the differences in sentence patterns and grammatical structures between Chinese and English,understood the differences in the reading habits of Chinese and English readers.In order to deal with the key points and difficulties mentioned above,the writer uses Nord’s text analysis mode to analyze the original text,and under the guidance of Nord’s "Function Plus Loyalty" principle,the writer adopts common translation strategies and skills such as addition,depletion,use of four-character idioms,transference of sentence structure and division to solve the problems regarding the problems of vocabulary and sentence pattern.Under the guidance of Nord’s functionalism,the writer has not only tried her best to accurately understand and convey the author’s writing intention,but also to retain the original author’s writing style and language characteristics in the translation process.Through this translation practice,the writer finds that when dealing with expressive texts,the intention of the original author should be conveyed accurately and faithfully,and the writing style and language features of the original author should be preserved to the greatest extent in the process of translation,so as to consider the dimension of "elegance" on the premise of functional equivalence,to better improve the quality of the translation and provide better reading experience for the readers.For one thing,the translator should be careful and responsible to ensure that she not only understands the information accurately but also doesn’t miss or distort the information in the process of transmission;for another,she should take into account the reading habits and reading preferences of the target language readers,the differences between Chinese and English,so as to guarantee that the translation is easy to understand and conform to the Chinese readers’ expression habits;last but not least,in the process of translation,considering that the text is expressive and cannot be translated too mechanically and rigidly,the language style and aesthetic value of the original text should be preserved to the maximum degree.However,in this translation practice,there are still some problems that need to be further considered and improved,such as whether there is other more authoritative names with higher recognition for the various kinds of fish mentioned in Chapter IV;whether there is any divergence regarding the understandings between the writer and the author given that Chapter V covers a great deal of professional backgrounds knowledge in the art field.These problems still entail studying and pondering in the later stage to improve the quality of the translation and ensure the readers’ smooth reading experience.