A Report On The English Translation Of Memories Of Jiang Nan(Chapters 18-19)

This report describes the translation of Chinese novel.The translation material selected in this report is Memories of Jiang Nan(Chapters 18 and 19)written by Wang Xufeng,the winner of the fifth Mao Dun Literature Prize.The excerpts has a total of20,834 words.The novel mainly tells the story of the Hang family,who is engaged in the tea industry in Hangzhou,Zhejiang Province.It shows the Chinese way of life and conveys the unique character and concept of the Chinese people.The author uses tea to represent the Chinese people and the gentle Chinese character.It is hoped that the translation of this book spread the excellent Chinese culture.The source text used a large number of culture-loaded words,four-character structures and folk adages in the lexical level.In syntactic level,there are run-on sentences and metaphor sentences.In discourse level,many characters’ dialogues are included,and scene description’s language is exquisite.According to these characteristics,the translator chose relevance translation theory as guidance.Relevance translation theory was proposed by Ernst August Gutt in 1991.This theory regards translation as an ostensive-inferential process with the aim of achieving optimal relevance.Under the guidance of relevance translation theory,this report made case analysis from three levels: lexical,syntactic and discourse.In lexical level,the translator mainly discussed culture-loaded words,four-character structures and folk adages.According to the cognitive context of the target readers,the translator adopted free translation,transliteration,subtractive translation and annotation,expressing the meaning of words accurately.In syntactic level,the translator mainly discussed metaphor sentences and run-on sentences.The translator presented the ostensive-inferential process of metaphor sentences and analyzed the translations.For run-on sentences,the translator reasonably divided and reconstructed the sentences according to the sentence logic.In discourse level,the characters’ dialogues and scene descriptions are discussed.The translator adopted the methods of ellipsis,substitution,adjusting word order and sentence structure to achieve the coherence of the translation.Through theory study and case analysis,the translator found that relevance translation theory has a good guiding effect on the translation of Chinese novels,and also made a conclusion for this translation practice.It is hoped that this report can provide some references for the translation of such literary works.