| This is an English-Chinese translation report.The original text is selected from the popular English novel A Burning by the Indian writer Megha Majumdar.It mainly tells the story of three protagonists: Jivan,a slum girl accused of a train attack;PT Sir,a sports teacher eager for political power;Lovely,a third gender with a movie dream.Because of a train attack,their fates begin to intertwine,but finally go to different directions.The story is set in contemporary Indian society.At present,there is no relevant translation in China.There are a lot of dialogues in the original text.Novel dialogue plays an important role in depicting the characters and promoting the development of the plot,which is also crucial to the overall translation quality.Because novel dialogue and translation has similarities with interaction,the author introduces Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory as the theoretical basis of this translation report.Adaptation theory holds the view that language use is a process of continuous choice,and context and language structures are important ingredients affecting language choice.Based on the analysis of the dialogue in the novel A Burning,the translator points out the difficulties encountered in translation practice from the point view of language structures,including difficulties at lexical level: the culture-loaded words,polysemy and words without proper dictionary meaning;at syntactic level: parentheses and elliptical sentences;at discourse level: how to strengthen the coherence of discourse and highlight the characters’ personalities and emotions.In view of the above difficulties,the author focuses on the adaptation to different levels of communicative context,and adopts different translation methods,including transliteration plus annotation,semantic choice based on context and semantic extension;reinventing sentence structures and adding words;changing the original cohesive devices and using modal particles.From the perspective of communicative contextual adaptation,with 25 examples selected from the novel,the author discusses how to use different translation methods to solve translation difficulties and complete translation practice.By adapting to the communicative contexts of the characters in dialogue and the target readers,the translator provides a relatively accurate translation.At the same time,through the study of the English-Chinese translation practice of A Burning,the translator finds that communicative contextual adaptation theory can be used as an entry point for the translation of novel dialogues,and hopes that this translation report can bring some experience and help to future study related to this text type. |
