A Practice Report On The Translation Of Midnight At The Blackbird Cafe(Excerpts)

Magic Realism is a creative style of writing the real world with illusory stories.One of its important characteristics is to break the boundaries between life and death,man and ghost.The particularity of its literary genre will undoubtedly bring some obstacles to translation.How to cross the gap of culture,thinking and language to show the ideas behind the “magic” works is worthy of our in-depth discussion.The original text of this practice report is excerpted from Midnight at the Blackbird Caféwritten by Heather Webber — an American writer who has been nominated for the Agatha Award twice.A large number of slang and unique expressions make the sentences more vivid,but at the same time,it also brings some difficulties to translation.Starting from the framework of Li changshuan’s “ Comprehension,Expression,Adaptation”,this report focuses on the translation process and explores how to give full play to translator’s subjective initiative and flexibility on the premise of fully understanding the original text,so as to reproduce language characteristics of the original text to the greatest extent and improve the reader experience of target language readers.Under the guidance of the theoretical framework of “ Comprehension,Expression,Adaptation”,the author uses some translation strategies and methods such as addition,splitting and word order adjustment to analyze and discuss representative cases,in order to underline the importance of understanding and emphasize the translation process rather than the translation results.Through this translation practice,the author deeply realizes that being faithful to the original should not only be loyal to the content,but also pay more attention to conveying the stylistic style of the original,so as to restore the characteristics of the original.It is necessary for translators to be flexible and attach importance to readers’ reading experience.Concurrently,translators also need to grasp the degree of flexibility.Rome was not built in a day,and translators should also constantly explore and practice.