| The Pulitzer Prize Winner,Sontag:Her Life and Work,is written by Benjamin Moser in 2020.It is a biography of the emblematic writer of the American twentieth century,Susan Sontag.With access to Sontag’s restricted archives,Moser showed a definitive portrait by conducting extensive interviews with people,including both her friends and enemies,who have never talked about her in public.Following the order of time,the book reveals Sontag’s life and work from her traumatic childhood and teenage years to the writing of her major books and her political activism.The complexity of Sontag’s characteristics is displayed as it was.Chapters 35,36,and 37 were selected for translation.These three parts center around Sontag’s life in Sarajevo and her play Waitingfor Godot,public opinions about her,and her novel In America respectively.In the chosen chapters,parentheses are extensively used to enrich the language and achieve the communicative goal of the discourse.From the perspective of semantics and pragmatics,the translator categorized these parentheses into three types based on their fundamental function:parenthesis with semantic supplement function,parenthesis with rhetorical function,and parenthesis with cohesive function.Furthermore,the semantic supplement function can be divided into three subtypes:adding extra information,explaining and elaborating previous information,and modulating the tone;the rhetorical function also contains two aspects:delivering subjectivity and adjusting writer’s responsibility.Following the classification,the translator concludes five translation methods after completing the project,i.e.keeping parenthesis in its original place;putting parentheses at the beginning of the sentence;putting parentheses at the end of the sentence;recasting;using round brackets.Meanwhile,some patterns were also observed.First,putting parentheses at the beginning of the sentence was found quite effective when the translator dealt with parentheses used to add extra information which usually states the pre-condition and the environment of the main argument.Second,keeping parenthesis in its original place proved very useful when dealing with parentheses that modulate the tone,since this type of parentheses frequently appears as short adverbial phrases that require little adjustment of position in English-to-Chinese translation.Third,parentheses with rhetorical functions were often separated from the host sentence semantically to emphasize the author’s intention.Therefore,they were translated using round brackets or put at the beginning or the end of the sentence to introduce or comment on the major argument.Fourth,parentheses with cohesive functions can be translated more naturally with the help of some logical linkers while following the original sentence order.Fifth,given the feature of parenthesis that usually cuts the host sentence in the middle,adding conjunctive words can often make the translation more idiomatic and maintain the cohesion of the passage no matter what function a parenthesis plays or if there is a need to relocate it. |
