A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Night Watchman (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation Theory

The source text of this translation practice report is selected from the novel The Night Watchman by the Native American writer Louis Erdrich.The novel won the2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,telling the story of a Native American tribe who fought against a “Emancipation” bill passed by the United States government and finally stopped its implementation.The author wrote this book based on the true experience of her grandfather,and she criticized the United States government’s long-term policies against the Native Americans.The translation project chose the first eight chapters of The Night Watchman,containing more than thirteen thousand words.The original book is a Native American novel and features rich Native American culture.The culture-loaded words,and the juxtaposition of Native American culture and the white colonial culture are the topics of this translation report.In the purpose of preserving the Native American culture of the source text,conveying the emotion and intention of the author,and producing an equivalent effect in the target readers,the translator takes Peter Newmark’s communicative translation as the guiding theory,puts target language readers front and center,flexibly employs of a variety of translation techniques to preserve the culture of the original text,striving to improve the acceptability and readability of the translation while retaining the semantic meaning of the source text.In this report,the translator analyzes the cultural phenomena from the lexical level and syntactic level with specific cases.At the lexical level,the names,places,and slangs in Native American language are the subjects of the study,while at the syntactic level,the passive voice,rhetoric devices and cultural juxtaposition.Through the translation practice,the translator may safely draw the conclusion that communicative translation theory could be applied in the translation process to convey the juxtaposition of elements of Native culture and white culture in the source text and achieve maximum communicative effect of the target text,rather than presupposing generally word for word translation or sentence for sentence translation strategies.