A Report On E-C Translation Of "On Not Being A Dove"

John Updike,a great contemporary American writer,is best known for his masterpiece the Rabbit Tetralogy which features the life of middle-class families in the suburban towns of the American East.Self-Consciousness: Memoirs is his autobiography published in 1989 in which the author gives a thorough reflection on his past life,specifically some of the major experiences and events which have figured tremendously in both his life and his writing.This memoir consists of six chapters altogether and in the fourth chapter,entitled“On Not Being a Dove”,Updike expresses his views on America's intervention of the Vietnam War,which was a heated political issue of the 1960 s.As far as writing is concerned,Updike's style of elegance and sensitive description is fully mirrored in this chapter: a lot of adjectives,clauses,parenthesis are utilized to depict details.There is also information concerning the contemporary politics,military,history,and era densely packed in the chapter.Besides,a large portion of the source text consists of long and difficult sentences and proper nouns.In order to render the source text into target language reducing the reading difficulty of the target text,the translator chooses the Relevance Theory to guide her translation.Based on this theory,the translator tries to make the translation catered to the target readers' cognitive needs.Firstly,the translator tries to deal with the source text on the linguistic level,which contains the refinement of words,the domestication of sentence patterns and the maintenance of rhetorical devices.Secondly,on the cultural level,because of the default of religion,history,politics as well as era features information,the translator tries to overcome the obstacles of lacking cognitive environments by employing translation strategies like amplification,annotation,omission to deliver the original author's intentions and to achieve optimal relevance.