A Report On E-C Translation Of Behold The Dreamers (Excerpts)

This is a report on the E-C translation practice of Behold the Dreamers.With the development of cultural diversification,literature translation is playing a more and more important role in cultural exchanges.As a means of cultural exchange,literary translation undertakes the important mission of conveying the thoughts and connotations of original works.Novel is a very important genre in literary works,and novel translation plays a crucial role in promoting cultural exchange.Behold the Dreamers is the debut novel by the emerging American writer Imbolo Mbue.It is a realistic novel and won the 2017 Faulkner Award for Fiction.This novel can be regarded as a collection of American headlines,covering the current hot issues of race,class,economy,culture and immigration.The translation practice selected chapters 1-6 of the novel as the source text.After the translation work,the translator adopted induction and case analysis method to analyze the translation difficulties and translation strategies in this work.This report mainly reports on four translation difficulties encountered by the translator in the translation process and the solutions to the difficulties.First,there is a lot of Nigerian pidgin English in the source text,which is hard to understand and translate.Secondly,there are many long sentences with complex structure.The third difficulty is how to use acceptable Chinese to express the logic and referential relationship of various deixis in the original.To deal with those difficulties,the translator resorted to different translation methods and strategies,mainly including free translation,literal translation,annotation,inversion and division.At the same time,this report gives a discussion on how to appropriately use Chinese four-character idioms to make the translation smooth,fluent,concise and accurate,so that the translation can conform to the reading habits of the target language readers.This translation practice has offered the translator a good opportunity to appreciate literary works and improve translation skills.It is hoped that this report will provide case references for others who are interested in literary translation.