A Translation Project Report On Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life(Excerpts)

In ancient China,“yuan ”(园)refers to a place surrounded by walls and fences,and is a place of hunting and entertainment for royal members.“Yi”(艺)means “craftsmanship”.Therefore,“yuan yi” refers to the art of plant cultivation and management in fenced gardens.Throughout the ages,the cause of horticulture is a symbol of the Chinese nation’s outstanding culture with five thousand years.Moreover,it has made great contributions to promoting cultural exchanges among countries.This thesis is an English-Chinese translation project report.The source text is excerpted from Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life by the American female writer Marta McDowell.It includes the introduction and the first half of Chapter One(10100 words in total).This part mainly describes the scenery in Emily Dickinson’ s garden when Spring comes.And it also explores Dickinson’s passion for the plants in the garden as well as their influence on Dickinson’ s poetry creation.The book on the theme of gardening also records the season changes in her Garden and reveals to readers many little-known details as well.The author combines Dickinson’ s poetry,letter excerpts,and art of plants together in an effort to provide us with a new perspective to understand the renowned but mysterious female poet of the United States.The translator has found two major problems in the course of translation.At first,in the source text,the author quotes a lot of poems by Dickinson.These poems in simple words are rich in images.At the same time,considering the rhythm of the Chinese language,the translator doesn’t know how to translate them properly.Secondly,Dickinson was an American female poet who lived more than 100 years ago.Owing to the influence of the social and cultural background at that time,there are many terms that are different from the current concept.The translator needs to check carefully and analyze whether the translation is appropriate in reference to history.In addition,this translation project is positioned as a biographical text with simple,natural,exquisite words among which there are a large number of gardening terms.It also has quoted many poems by Dickinson,which are of great value in terms of translation research.Through translating this work,we will help the target language readers understand gardening,love gardening,and promote the development of worldgardening.Meanwhile,the target language readers can appreciate the unique customs and natural scenery of the United States at that time.Therefore,the cross-cultural communication can be achieved.In this translation process,the translator is guided by Peter Newmark’s communicative translation and semantic translation theory.On the premise of being faithful to the source text and in respect to the semantic structure and syntactic structure of the source text,the translator has used many methods such as omission,amplification,inversion,adaptation and conversion to solve the problems encountered in translation so as to ensure that the effect obtained by the target language readers is close to the effect of the source language reader.In all,the translator further realizes that down-to-earth effort is required in the course of improving the translation ability.A qualified translator not only needs to fully understand the source language,but also needs to have a good command of its background.Moreover,the translator should be equipped with the ability to choose proper translation methods and strategies according to the source language style.