A Report On The E-c Translation Of The Nickel Boys(Chapters 6-9) From The Perspective Of Chesterman’s Translation Norms

This thesis is a report on the translation of chapters 6-9 of The Nickel Boys,a novel based on reality.This novel,written by African American author Colson Whitehead,winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,tells the story of a black boy sentenced to a hellish reform school in Florida during the 1960 s Jim Crow era.The pot is based on the Dozier School in Florida,USA.The century-old school began as a way to indoctrinate problem boys and gradually became a hotbed of beatings,rapes and killings of inmates as the school became more and more populated with boys.The chapters selected for translation follow the main character Elwood from what he sees and hears on his first day at Nickel to the annual boxing match that takes place at the school.The author uses this novel to bring to life the dehumanizing oppression and mistreatment of blacks during the Jim Crow era,and as a metaphor for the racial problems of American society today.Translating this book into Chinese will help Chinese readers get a fuller picture of a real America and hopefully shed some light on the problematic child education issues that exist in our lives.In this translation practice,the translator takes Chesterman’s theory of translation norms as the theoretical support.Building upon Toury’s theory of translation norms,Chesterman proposed expectancy norms and professional norms,which can be divided into accountability norm,communication norm and relation norm.In the following translation report,the translator takes the reproduction of the original simple and plain style of the original and the conveyance of the metaphor of critical racial discrimination as the main principles and selects semantic,syntactic and pragmatic strategies to comply with the expectancy norms of target readers and professional norms which are the optimal relevance with the source text under the guidance of the theory of translation norms.This translation report consists of five parts.The first part introduces the background and significance of the project,the background of the novel and analyzes the textual characteristics of the source text.The second part describes the whole process of translation,including pre-translation,in-translation and post-translation.The third part introduces the theoretical framework and translation strategies of Chesterman’s theory of translation norms.The fourth part is case studies,which discusses how to choose semantic,syntactic and pragmatic strategies to solve the translation problems such as the segmentation and combination of clauses,slang,metaphors and so on,so as to comply with the norms of accountability and relation and meet the norms of expectation.The fifth part provides a summary of this translation practice.