A Report On The C-E Translation Of Looking For Dad (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of The Linguistic Structural Adaptability

As a part of literary translation,children’s literature has its essential effects on the development of the educational philosophy between the western and China,helping children to grow up well around the world.Although much of excellent children’s literature has come out in China nowadays,they are not known among the children and scholars in the western world.Apparently,it is necessary to undertake the Chinese-English translation of them in the literary circle.On this recognition,the translator chooses the first five parts of Looking for Dad,a new children’s literary work by Cao Wenxuan,the famous children’s literature writer in China,as her MTI translation task,which goes on half a year.After the translation work,the translator writes this report on her translation experience and reflections from the perspective of the linguistic structural adaptability in Verschueren’s linguistic adaptation theory.The report presents the analysis of the linguistic choices the translator made at the phonetic,lexical and syntactic levels in the translation process.In order to adapt to the kids’ reading habits and psychological needs,she tried to keep the natural speaking voice and the linguistic style of children’s literature by employing the translation strategy of free translation to render some lexical items in the source text with the form of alliteration.Similarly,free translation was also used to translate the reduplication and onomatopoeia in the source text.At the lexical level,she used the strategies of free translation and domestication,and the techniques conversion,omission,and addition to make the word choice in the target language,that is,choosing the prepositional phrases,pronouns,nouns and adjectives,so as to adapt to the kids’ expressing mode.More importantly,in order to meet the kids’ cognition,the translator tried to make her translation colloquial,short and sweet in word choice,avoiding redundancy,omitting repeated verbs,and choosing the proper adverbs to enrich the emotion in the translation.At the syntactic level,the translator made use of the method of conversion and negation,transferring the short sentences in the source text into the complex sentences in the target text,and made the conversion between the affirmative and the negative,and the conversion between the active and the passive voice so as to conform to the mode of expression of children.