A Report On E-C Translation Of The Noel Letters （Excerpts）

The book,The Noel Letters,is one of The Christmas Box written by American author Richard Paul Evans,which focuses on the main character（Noel）,who has been away from hometown to receive education for many years with a deep resentment against her father because of her mother’s death.The novel is driven by a series of emotional shifts from misunderstanding toward his father to understanding and forgiveness.Under the guidance of the Adaptation Theory,this translation practice selects chapters one to six from The Noel Letters for translation,aiming at discussing the ways to better translate the original information so that the readers can have a deeper comprehension of the novel.The Adaptation Theory,put forward by pragmatist Jef Verschueren,explores the use of human language from three perspectives including cognition,society,and culture respectively,and emphasizes “adaptation” and “choice-making”.At the same time,the use of language is a continuous process of linguistic choice,and the reason why the language users can make proper choices because language has three characteristics: variability,negotiation,and adaptability.Taking linguistic adaptation as a starting point,Jef Verschueren proposes four analytical dimensions namely covering contextual correlates of adaptability,structural objects of adaptability,dynamic of adaptability,and salience of adaptability process.In line with the above four perspectives,the translation of The Noel Letters is systematically studied in this thesis.In order to adapt to the cognition of the target readers and to remove the communicative barriers between Chinese and English in the translation process,the thesis regards the English-Chinese translation of epistolary novels as a process of choice-making and communicative adaptation.Therefore,this thesis argues that communicative context and linguistic context can achieve adaptation under the framework of the Adaptation Theory.The level of lexical and syntactic perspectives are adopted to achieve structural objects of adaptability.Negation and inversion are applied to conform to the communicative purpose of the original text for the dynamics of adaptability.For the salience of the adaptability processes,more attention will be paid to the source text author and the target readers to meet the need for salience adaptation.With analysis of this translation practice from the above four angles,the translator finds that the Adaptation Theory plays a significant role in the process of translation of epistolary novels.The specific translation skills are summarized by the translator in this report from four aspects of Adaptation Theory,which can provide a valuable reference for effective communication between English novels and their Chinese equivalents.