A Report On The Translation Of Pearl S.buck’s Novels Of China And America: The Battle Of Life (Excerpts)

Since Pearl S.Buck won the Nobel Prize in literature,her works have attracted extensive attention from scholars at home and abroad.Rob Hardy is one of the literary critics.His e-book Pearl Buck’s Novels of China and America: The Battle of Life discusses how Buck’s thought develops through the medium of her novels.This translation report extracts its Chapter 2 “‘Better to Be a Dog’? Pearl Buck’s Reflections on Chinese Life and Thought in Troubled Times” as the source text of the translation.In this chapter,Hardy explores Buck’s fictional characters who lived from the traditional to modern China(1919-1949),reveals their values and value and analyzes Buck’s reflections on the relationship between Chinese and western culture.The translation of Hardy’s Chapter 2 is conducive to promoting a deeper understanding of Buck’s novels and the academic exchange between Chinese and western scholars.In the translation process,as the excerpts involve many proper nouns,adverbs and adjectives,passive voice,long and complex sentences as well as different cohesive devices,the translator met many difficulties.The solutions to them should be guided by relevant theories.As a literary criticism text,it aims to convey the author’s academic opinions and express his evaluations to the readers.Therefore,this report draws on Reiss’ s text typology as the theoretical guidance,attempts to analyze and solve these difficulties from three levels: lexis,syntax and text,and summarizes relevant translation methods and techniques.Major points to highlight: at the lexical level,proper nouns can be processed according to the “name after an originating person” principle,or the most commonly used translations,or transliteration;and adverbs and adjectives can be translated by using the literal translation method and the shift technique of parts of speech,and at the same time by taking advantage of the Chinese four-character structure.At the syntactical level,the translator can change the passive voice into the active or replace it with other means such as the shifting technique and can use the techniques of cutting and recasting to translate the long and complex sentences.At the textual level,the addition technique and literal translation method can be employed to deal with the grammatical and lexical cohesion.It is hoped that this translation report can provide some inspiration and suggestions for the translation of the literary criticism text under the guidance of text typology.