E-C Translation Of Discourse Markers In Juvenile Detective Novels

Juvenile detective novels,which are characterized by thrills and suspenses,have always been deeply loved by young readership.And as an“imported”literary form,juvenile detective novels have become rather popular in the domestic book market in recent years.Pitifully,this special genre of literature in China is still in the budding stage and with a mixed quality.Translating juvenile detective novels of high quality such as Nancy Drew Series can not only add to reading materials reservoirs for young readers,but also provide reference for the writing and publishing of detective novels at home.Nancy Drew Series,with its brave and resourceful protagonist,twisted and tight storyline,are popular around the world,and hence,chosen as the material for my translation practice.This report is based on the translation of the 24^th（The Clue in The Old Album）and the 25^thvolumes（The Ghost of Blackwood Hall）of the Series.In the process of translation,the author found that Discourse Markers（DMs）,which are abundant in dialogues and interactions between characters,have played a pivotal role in the internal coherence of the text,and could become barriers to the readers’accurate understanding and challenges to the translation.The Theory of Functional Equivalence was therefore adopted to tackle the problem and meet translation quality requirements.Fraser,using the pragmatic function as criteria,has classified DMs into five categories:contrastive,elaborative,inferential,topic change,and filler markers.The five-category has been adopted to better represent the discourse coherence in the author’s E-C translation practice.Ultimately,lessons are drawn that 1)the DMs can be analyzed based on factors such as communicative purposes,characters’emotions,and context;2)the differences between English and Chinese thinking should be considered from the perspectives of source texts and target readers;3)literal translation should be avoided;4)an effective bilingual conversion mechanism could be established based on faithfulness to the original text.All these measures could be taken to realize a coherent translation and enable readers to better understand the content of the novel.The author hopes that these experiences will provide some points of reference and lessons to be learned for similar translation problems.