A Report On Chinese Translation Of Maugham’s Short Stories

Maugham is one of the renowned writers in British literary history.His Collected Short Story Volume 2 consists of 11 short stories,among which some stories have Chinese versions.However,there are no complete Chinese translation of this collection.Sponsored by Shanghai 99 Readers’ Culture Industrial Co.,Ltd and entrusted to the authoress’s supervisor in November,2018,the translation was published by People’s Literature Publishing House in 2020.Under the guidance of her supervisor,the authoress undertook the translation of Chapter Five "The creative impulse" and Chapter Eleven "The Treasure",which total 36,000-plus Chinese characters.The two chapters that the authoress translated contain considerable language description,action description,appearance description and psychological description.Accurate reproduction of the original style through flexible combination of various translation strategies and techniques is the major challenge of this translation practice.According to the translation contract,the translation should be "faithful to the original content and fluent in the target language".In accordance with this requirement and relevant literary translation theories,the authoress chose "stylistic fidelity" as the theoretical guidance for the translation practice.To recreate Maugham’s lifelike characters,the authoress took into consideration the characters’status,educational background,personalities and occupation in the translation of their language,action and appearance.To reproduce Maugham’s smoothness and plainness,the authoress makes flexible use of reversing,cutting and embedding in the translation of the long and complex sentences.Punctuation marks are also adjusted,added and deleted to better express the characters’ attitude,emotion and psychology.The authoress hopes that her translation ability will be improved and her solutions will be of some help to literary translators.