A Report On English-Chinese Translation Of Burning Bright(Excerpts)

This report is based on the Chinese translation of Chapter 1—Chapter 4 of the short novel Burning Bright by Nick Petrie,a New Zealand writer.This is a short thriller,full of adrenaline-pumping plots,unrelenting action and dangerous characters.The creation of this novel has achieved the organic unity of form and contents.Meanwhile,the translation and introduction of the theme of thrillers have also had a certain significance in the history of Chinese translated literature.Burning Bright mainly tells the veteran Peter Ash seeking peace and quietness among the towering redwoods of northern California with an unexpected trip.He finds a runaway woman named June in the tree.June suspects that the men who are still on her trail are looking for something belonging to her mother,a prominent software designer who recently died in an accident.Peter and June have to be one step ahead of their pursuers to solve this strange mystery.This novel,with a good plot and reasoning,is an expressive text.When reading the novel,readers will have a physiological fear.The translator needs to choose translation strategies and methods according to the type of the source texts and the specific translation intentions in the process of translation,so the target language readers can get almost the same feelings as the source language readers.Under the guidance of Newmark’s Semantic Translation and Communicative Translation,such translation methods as addition and division were used in the process of translation of Burning Bright.At the same time,the translator made a summary,gave a profound consideration of the problems encountered in the translation at lexical and syntactic levels and had a deeper understanding of semantic translation and communicative translation,thus constantly improving her translation competence.In this translation project,the translator has achieved the following gains:(1)Semantic translation and communicative translation complement each other and cannot be separated,which can effectively guide the translation of expressive texts;(2)The translator has improved her understanding of semantic translation and communicative translation;(3)This translation practice is conducive to improving the translator’s translation ability of thriller texts.