A Report On English-Chinese Translation Of The Inheritors(Excerpts)

This report is based on the author’s translation of the first six chapters of the English novel The Inheritors(1901).Written by famous writers Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford,the novel tells people’s confusion in an era of the great development of socially productive forces in the early twentieth century,with an aim to criticize the corruption of the bourgeoisie and colonialism in Britain.Different from the traditional novelists,the two authors adopt impressionist techniques for characterization in their co-authored book,focusing on the perception of readers as the cognitive subject and conveying to readers the impression of real life.To represent the original literary impressionism,the translator applies relevance translation theory,which is within the cognitive translation research field.According to the relevance translation theory,translation can be viewed as a process of inference,and translators’ responsibility is therefore to establish optimal relevance so that readers can obtain adequate contextual effects through minimal processing cost.Under the guidance of the theory,the translator focuses on the ostensive-inferential mode and contextual analysis in the translation process,attempting to establish the optimal relevance between the original authors’ communicative intention and the target readers.Based on the detailed analysis of five major methods of characterization in the original novel,this report summarizes and elaborates the corresponding translation methods through the case analysis:(1)In the appearance descriptions,the original novel uses parallel noun phrase structures and subject-predicate structures,forming a superposition of auditory and visual effects.The translation accordingly retains the parallelism.(2)In the action descriptions,the original text uses fewer logical conjunctions between different actions,and the translation uses sentence separating;the original text often changes the perspectives,and the translation explicitizes them.(3)In the dialogue descriptions,the original text uses culture-loaded words for allusions,and the translation adds relevant annotations to them;the original text uses word play in conversations,and the translation reproduces word play by keeping word repetitions.(4)In the psychological descriptions,the original text uses ellipsis and pauses to construct fragmented language.The translation respectively uses four-character Chinese and retains punctuation in sentences.(5)In the environmental descriptions,the original text uses the words of color to present visual perception and repeated words to build auditory perception.In the translation,these effects are conveyed by addition and using four-character Chinese words.This report holds that in literary translation,it is necessary to pay attention to the writing techniques of the original text and understand the intention of the original author,so that the target reader can obtain adequate contextual effect with minimal processing efforts.It is hoped that this report can provide a reference for the translation of similar texts and enrich the translation research of impressionist novels.