A Report On The E-C Translation Of Historical Fictions Under The Guidance Of George Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion

Colson Whitehead is a talented African-American writer whose works feature a wide range of themes and different styles,so he is called “literary chameleon”(Mc Carthy,2016)by Harvard Magazine.Based on the E-C translation of the excerpts of The Nickel Boys written by Whitehead in 2019,the translation report attempts to solve the difficulties encountered in translation by using appropriate translation strategies guided by Hermeneutic Motion.George Steiner put forward Hermeneutic Motion and divided translation into four steps,namely,initial trust,aggression,incorporation and compensation.“Initial Trust”refers to the translator’s belief in the translatability of the source text.“Aggression”requires translators to fully understand the source text.“Incorporation” is to express the understanding of the second step through the target language.The imbalance between the source language and the target language may occur due to the above three translation steps,thus “compensation” is needed to supplement the loss.Under the guidance of this theory,the author tries to solve the difficulties encountered in translation from the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels combined with specific translation examples.In “trust”,it derives from the value of the original work.In “aggression” and “incorporation”,the author applies translation methods such as part-of-speech conversion,structural reorganization,concretization of abstract words,etc.In “compensation”,amplification and annotation are the main translation strategies the author applied to supplement information of the original text.Through the translation of The Nickel Boys(excerpt),it is concluded that George Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion is of guiding significance to the Chinese translation of English historical fictions.Hopefully,this thesis can provide useful reference and guidance for the Chinese translation of historical fictions.