A Report On The Chinese Translation Of The Journal To Stella(Letter Ⅰ To Letter Ⅵ)

The Journal to Stella is a collection of letters,which contains letters written by the famous writer Jonathan Swift to “Stella” who has a close relationship with him.These letters are written in journal writing style,recording Swift’s daily life in London from 1710 to 1713.Swift mentioned a lot of people and things he met in his letters,some of which contained a profound British cultural background.This report mainly deals with the Chinese translation practice of the Letter I to the Letter VI of the book.This report takes Li Changshuan’s “Comprehension,Expression and Adaptation”framework as the analytical framework and makes a case study on the basis of understanding the content and analyzing the characteristics of the original text.It mainly analyzes and summarizes some translation strategies and techniques of epistolary texts from lexical,syntactic and textual levels.In terms of vocabulary,the source text contains a large number of proper nouns,such as names of people,place names,official titles,etc.,and there are also some abbreviations,loanwords,etc.,which need the author to refer to materials to understand the relevant knowledge and their translations.In terms of syntax,there are many clauses in the source text,such as attributive clauses,adverbial clauses and object clauses.The author should first analyze the sentence structure and then transform the meaning flexibly when translating these sentences.At textual level,cohesion and coherence between sentences are taken into account.The author should analyze the logical relations among sentences and then show these relations in translation,in order to improve the readability and fluency of translation.Through this translation practice,the author realizes that it is very important for the whole translation practice to understand the content of the original text correctly in translating epistolary texts.At the same time,in the process of translation,attention should be paid to keeping the style of the target text consistent with that of the source text.