A Report On The Translation Of Coming Home For Christmas(Excerpt)

Translation is an activity of transforming one language into another,and it is also a bridge of cultural exchange.With the continuous expansion of China’s reform and opening up and the increasing frequency of cultural exchanges,translation has become more and more important.As an important medium of cultural exchange,foreign literary works can promote the development and prosperity of Chinese culture.Therefore,the translation of literary works is very essential.Novels are a common literary form,which is deeply loved by readers.In recent years,a large number of English novels have been flooding into China,and the translation of English novels has also attracted wide attention.The original text of English-Chinese translation is the novel Coming Home for Christmas,written by Patricia Scanlan and published in 2014.It mainly talks about the story of Alison who gradually realizes the warmth of family after being hit by unemployment.The text selected in this translation practice report is from the chapter one to the chapter five of this novel.The style of the novel is exquisite,and it narrated in the third person,with more dialogues,easy to understand.Moreover,it frequently used possessive adjectives.Therefore,the translator takes the English-Chinese translation of possessive adjectives as the starting point of this translation practice report.In English,the classification of pronouns contains possessive adjectives,but there is no possessive adjective in Chinese,which is generally expressed by words such as“我的”,“你的”,“你们的”.However,when possessive adjectives in English are expressed in Chinese,the character is often omitted(Chen,2000:83).Therefore,the difficulty of translation lies in that there is no such a grammatical noun as possessive adjective in Chinese,but for the expression of possessive adjectives in English,there will be many variants in Chinese,that is,the translation of possessive adjectives from English to Chinese will be diversified,so how to adopt appropriate methods in translation?The translator first classifies the nouns modified by the possessive adjectives in the text,and then adopts different translation methods according to the different types of nouns that the possessive adjectives modified,hoping to find more suitable translation methods.