A Report On The Translation Of The Secret Lives Of Church Ladies(Excerpts)

This report is based on the translation practice of chapters 3,4,and 5 of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.This novel is a collection of short stories in which the writer,in the first-person point of view,depicted several distinctive female characters and tells the story of the pursuit of their spiritual world.The dialogue between characters with different identities is the charm of the novel,and the selected chapters contain many similes,repetitions,and puns,which vividly express the rich inner world of the characters.It is an important task of this translation practice to restore the tone and language style of the characters’ discourse and reproduce them in the translation,as well as to flexibly deal with the translation of rhetorical devices properly and naturally.Guided by the Adaptation Theory,this report makes a case analysis of the dialogue between the characters in the selected chapters through the three aspects: interpersonal interaction,characters’ mentalities and stylistic devices mainly using the translation strategies of domestication,as well as literal translation,addition,modification,and other translation methods.Through this translation practice and analysis,the translator realizes that the description of character dialogue is the most direct way to depict the character image and unfold the plot of the novel.Only by doing a great job in the translation of characters’ dialogues and building an information bridge between the original and the translated work,can the original work be better understood to the readers.