A Report On The Chinese Translation Of Love Over Scotland(Chapters 23-33)

This report is based on the author’s translation practice of Chapter 23-33 of the popular novel Love over Scotland by contemporary British writer Alexander Mc Call Smith,and so far it has not a Chinese translation.The practice has about 20,000 words.The novel,one of a series of novels called 44 Scotland Street,won the tenth place in“Amazon’s Literature and Fiction Works List”.Through the story of a group of young people living in a flat at 44 Scotland Street,it explores profoundly ethical and moral issues.This work involves a lot of dialogues and psychological descriptions,which requires a careful consideration of stylistic communication to achieve a balance between colloquiality and literariness.The concept of “direct translation” from Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s Relevance Theory could be very helpful for us to understand and translate the text style since the direct translation strives to preserve the communicative clues in the source text in order to retain the original style and create the optimal relevance for the target language readers to achieve a successful cross-cultural communication.Guided by the theory,this report will analyze the semantic,syntactic,rhetorical and cultural aspects of the communicative clues to explore how to reproduce the communicative clues and represent as accurately as possible the style of the original text,so as to achieve the optimal relevance.At the semantic level,we can start from identifying the contextualized meaning and maintaining the stylistic and emotional feature.At the syntactic level,communicative clues can be reproduced by preserving syntax and maintaining logical coherence.At the rhetorical level,the rhetoric of imagery in slang can be preserved and the original rhetoric can be directly translated.At the cultural level,the report summarizes the methods of retaining the symbolic meaning of imagery and direct translation with annotation for the cultural imagery and things unique to the western culture in the original text.Through this translation practice,the author verifies that the “direct translation”concept of Relevance Theory is instructive for representing the style of novels,and offers some personal thoughts on the translation and style reproduction of popular novels.