A Report On Translating The Novel Cut

These translation chapters are extracted from the chapter one,chapter two and chapter three of Cut,which is written by Cathy Glass,a British autobiographical novelist.The chosen translation chapters mainly introduce the reason why the novelist Cathy Glass adopted children and what happened when Cathy Glass adopted Jack and a thirteen year old rebellious girl Down.This translation report consists four sections.The first section is mainly about the reason and background of the translation mission.Cut has recently been written by Cathy Glass in 2009,and it has no Chinese version now.Besides English literature works is quite important and influential in China,therefore translating this kind of works is to make contribution to translation study.The second section is the introduction to the adopted translation theory:Nida’s Functional Equivalence and Reader-Oriented Theory.The Functional Equivalence emphasizes that translation is to use the most suitable as well as natural words to reproduce the original text from it’s meaning to style.While the Reader-Oriented Theory just considers receptors as essential to the interpretation of literature works instead of considering original material as the only determiner of meaning.Additionally,the characteristics of the original material are introduced.This novel is belongs to autobiographical novel and its target reader is teenager,so there is a lot of colloquial words,description words,short sentences,and single sentences.The third section is mainly about the translation principle,and in doing translation,the translator adheres to Nida’s translation principle,and in order to achieve faithfulness in translation the translator should strive to make the translated text closest naturally equivalent to the original material both in terms of meaning and style.Translation challenges include using appropriate translation strategies to make the translation clear,coherent and easy to understand.The corresponding translation strategies applied includes lexical strategy and syntactic strategy.The fourth section is the introduction of experiences coming from this translation mission.Through this translation mission,the translator has a better understanding of autobiographical novel translation.Many westerners adore individuality,and stress the realization of one’s self-value.On this ground,most of autobiographies or autobiographical novels are created,and during the process of translating these autobiographical novels the translator is required to put himself in the original author’s place,therefore comprehending the context and widely referring relevant information are necessary.At the same time the author realizes that translators should not be confined to the syntactic structure of source text,and should focus on revealing the meaning as well as style of source text,so that the translation can achieve functional equivalence.