E-C Translation Report Of Birth Of A Dream Weaver(Excerpt)

The source text of this translation report is the first three chapters of Ng?g? wa Thiong'o's autobiography Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening,a literary work full of vivid language and abundant sentiment.The biggest difficulty encountered is reproducing the deep ideographic functions of English postmodifier in literary translation.English postmodifiers are more diversified in composition and more widely used than Chinese ones.Moreover,in literary works,plentiful ideographic functions of postmodifiers are often implicit in deep grammatical structure.All these lead to the challenge of translating English postmodifiers into Chinese.According to the concrete ideographic functions of postmodifiers,the author classifies the main difficulties as: 1)reproducing the function of expressing the writer's subjective emotions;2)reproducing the function of acting as the adverbial of main clause;3)reproducing the function of supplementing and explaining background information.Functional equivalence theory argues that the source language and the target language cannot be completely equivalent.The translator's job is to reproduce the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message in the receptor language to achieve “functional equivalence” between the two languages.This theory expects that the target readers' response is roughly the same as that of the source text readers.Guided by the theory of functional equivalence,the author explores the solutions to the above difficulties and puts forward the following translation tactics: 1)adjusting the center word,adding adverbs or conjunctions,and using affective expressions to express the writer's emotions;2)translating postmodifiers into subordinate clauses to clarify the logical connection between the postmodifier and the main clause;3)translating postmodifiers into an independent sentence to explain backgroundinformation.The translation practice proves that the accurate understanding of deep ideographic functions of English postmodifiers will greatly facilitate the choice of translation tactics and help achieve the maximum equivalence between the translation and the source text.This report provides useful guidance and reference for future translation of English postmodifiers.