約翰.高爾斯華綏名著翻譯報告
Chapter One Introduction
The source text of the translation task came from a “Bilingual Project” launched by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP), aiming at benefiting the students of Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) from practice of translating original English literatures. The translated works of this project will be published. Up to now, FLTRP has formed partnership with many universities, maintaining a long-term and stable relationship between each other. The cooperation relationship between FLTRP and Shandong University of Finance and Economics were officially established in May, 2013. The 13 students in our class have participated in the cooperation project. Before being accepted as one member of this project, each student needs to complete a translation test which requires translating about 1000 English words to Chinese. The content of the test is from the short story of Maupassant: A sale. Only if the students passed the test, can he/she be allowed formally to participate in the translation project. Fortunately, all the students of our class got the final qualification to the project. The translation task started in May 2013 and the first draft were demanded to deliver to the supervisor by the end of September for further refining and modifying. After a preliminary review by FLTRP, our first draft was given feedback and correction in January, 2014. Then the translator was finalized one month later. The given task of the present author is to translate Galsworthy’s works including “Evolution”, “Magpie over the Hill”, “That Old-Time Place”, “Felicity”, “Reflections on Our Dislike of Thing as They Are”, “Romance-Three Gleams”, and “Wind in the Rocks”. The first three ones are short stories and the last four ones are essays. During the translation process, the translator has greatly improved translation skills and accumulated largely translation experiences. Pay attention to the quality of the translation version. Firstly, the translation version should avoid being similar with the already existed translations. Once being detected of plagiarism, the student would be directly rejected by FLTRP. Secondly, proper names and other technical terms in the source text should be translated with established standards according to translation manual. Thirdly, the translation version should be faithful to the source text and conform to Chinese expressions. ay attention to the wrongly written Chinese character in translation version. The similar Chinese character is one of the main reasons that people make mistakes when writing and reading, so the right form must be chosen by the translator, such as “做” and “作”, “的” ,“得” and “地”. Pay attention to punctuations. The most important thing in using punctuation is that correct punctuation should be used according to standard norms, especially colon, quotation mark and dash. The translator should also pay more attention to punctuation correspondence problems between source text and translation version. Concerning the above requirements of the project, the translator came up with the following goals which the translation task should achieve. Firstly, the translation should be faithful to the source text and use the proper words to express the source language. Secondly, differences between the Chinese functional words “的”, “得” ,“地” could bedistinguished and applied properly during the translation process. Thirdly, the translation task should be guaranteed to be finished and submitted to the entruster within the deadline.
............
Chapter Two Translation Process
2.1 Pre-translation
Searching for the author’s background information is the necessary step for good translation. His works are full of reflection on the society and he likes using sarcastic language, such as in his works of Evolution, Reflections on Our Dislike of Thing as They Are, That Old-Time Place, and Wind in the Rocks. The other linguistic features of Galsworthy’s works are concise and beautiful, he always offers readers lively and vivid picture of the landscape, using adjectives and adverbs to sketch the beautiful scene. The translator will analyze this writing style in the last chapter of the report. The marriage of Galsworthy had a far-reaching impact on his works. As the translator mentioned before, Galsworthy’s wife was his cousin’s ex-wife, they fell in love when Ada was still in marriage. Galsworthy believed in free love, this kind of consciousness can be found in Magpie over the Hill and Romance-Three Gleams. Making a general survey of the translation task can get better understanding of Galsworthy’s style and his linguistic features. The translator also had studied two Chinese versions of Galsworthy’ s best-known works, The Forsyte Soga, to absorb the experience from the recognized translation versions, so as to learn how to deal with the author’s writing style, linguistic features etc. After learning about the author, the translator needed to read the whole source text thoroughly. In this process, the translator grasped an overall understanding of the source text and comprehended the works’ linguistic features. According to Nida and Taber, “translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalence of the source-language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style (Nida, qtd. In Liao, 40)”. It is primely important for the translator to grasp the writing style of Galsworthy’s works by understanding the source text since writing style is the soul in both the source text and the translation version for literary works. Inaddition, comprehending the texts is the foundation of a high quality translation. The translator read through the whole source text for several times and marked names of people and place, difficult sentences and words, then went to the dictionary and other translation tools for help. In this step, the most important for the translator is trying to find out all the different meanings of the same word, and then chose the exact meaning of it. It is worth mentioning that the translator had prepared an Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary as well as other electronic dictionary for the translation process, because many words have many different meanings. Moreover, the translator downloaded some online translation softwares such as Youdao Dict and Kingsoft Powerword for understanding words. It is also necessary for the translator to check the webpages such as Google, Baidu and Wikipedia. Dictionaries are indispensable tool in the whole process of the translation.
2.2 During-translation
Translation process is the most important part in the whole task. After the process of preparation, the translator had got a general comprehension of the source text. The mission for the translator in the next step is to express the comprehension of the sourcetext in authentic Chinese. The quality of the translation determines the quality of the report. It took the translator one month for the first version. During this process, the translator paid attention to the original meaning and sentence structure of the source text, and also found out the long and difficult sentences in order to further modify. The quality of the first version was poor because the translator just translated the general meaning of the works without adjusting the sentence structure. The translator preferred to allocate the translation process into two steps: the first step is just to express the source text in Chinese and the second step is to further modify the version in authentic Chinese. When finished the first step, the translator asked one of her classmates to read the translation version in order to find unidiomatic expressions. Then the translator spent two weeks to modify the long and difficult sentences and the unidiomatic expressions. When finished these two steps, the translator read the translation over and over for further polishing. There are many difficulties occurred during the translation process. Firstly, the translator found out the weakness with translating long and difficult clauses. Secondly, the translator had problems with a large amount of proper names like those of local scenic attraction, famous people, different rare plants as well as Gods and Goddess in Greek mythology. Thirdly, the translator couldn’t catch the mood of the dialogue in the source text.
Chapter Three Theoretical Framework•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 10
3.1 Functional Equivalence Theory •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 10
3.2 Four Principles of Translation •••••••••••••••••••••••••• 10
Chapter Four Case Analysis•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 13
4.1 Lexical Level••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 13
4.2 Syntactic Level•••••••••••••••17
4.2.1 Passive Voice••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 17
4.2.2 Long and Difficult Sentences •••••••••••••••••••••• 19
4.3 Textual Level••••••••••••••••••••••• 21
Chapter Five Conclusion••••••••••••• 25
Chapter Four Case Analysis
4.1 Lexical Level
In Version One ,the translator chose the meaning “改變” to express “move” when see the word “move” and “change”. After read the whole source text twice and consulted the context, the translator realized that the contents of this paragraph don’t mention the significance of “change”, but describe a kind of psychological shock which brought by the beautiful scenery. So finally the translator chose the meaning “感動” to express “move” in the source text. Version Two expresses the source text as “有誰不為之動情” to give occasion to the sympathetic response. On the lexical level, the theory in which priority of contextual consistency over verbal consistency is suitable for the translator to select the appropriate meaning for word. From the above examples, it is hard and unavoidable for the translator to choose the right meaning in the receptor language. In conclusion, translated words depended more on the context that upon a fixed system of verbal consistency. Artistry and antithesis are the two basic requirements to Chinese literary works, which need the translator to select rhetoric and aesthetic words. During this task the translator should always comply with the rule of meeting Chinese readers’ reading habits. Chinese like to use reduplicated words and idioms, especially Four-Chinese-Character Structure to arouse an emotional reaction. Four-Chinese-Character Structure is a good choice for the translator to achieve the effect, and a very common word formation in Chinese culture. In order to strengthen the author’s mood, Chinese intend to use Four-Chinese-Character Structure which has real meaning or just makes linguistic symmetry and rhythm expression. The phrase “burning up” often means “燒起來”, “發(fā)怒” in Chinese and in this example it is used to describe the blooming flowers with bright color. The main emphasis in these sentences is the word “colour”. In Version One, the Chinese character “熾熱” could not express the beautiful scenery of the color. So finally the translator changed “熾熱” to “濃烈似火” to convert the simple expression way into powerful expression.
4.2 Syntactic Level
There are a lot of different expression methods between languages, and there are no exactly same expressions in English and Chinese because of the different linguistic systems, cultural differences and other reasons. During the long process of learning English, the translator has found more than ten kinds of differences between Chinese and English. In this part, the translator mainly talks about two different aspects, the passive voice in English and active voice in Chinese along with long and difficult sentences in English and simple sentences in Chinese. Translators should notice these differences in translation process, especially in the literary translation. Organized by FLTRP, the translation version will be published in the form of electronic book for Chinese readers. As Nida said, the translator must attach greater importance to the forms understood and accepted by the audience for which a translation is designed than to the forms which may possess a longer linguistic tradition or have greater literary prestige. So he should take into account what the readers need when they read the translation. In a word, the translator should translate the source text in English into idiomatic Chinese according to the needs of the audience. There are many differences between Chinese and English in the use of voices. Passive voice is widely used in English while it is less used in Chinese. Although there are Chinese characters like “被” and “由” means the action is received passively, but the use of passive voice is not common, therefore, the passive voice in English often translated into active voice in Chinese. In the process of analyzing passive voice translation, the translator read through the statistic works of passive voice. Then the translator found four ways to translate passive voice. Firstly, translate passive sentences in English into active sentences in Chinese by keeping the original subject, adding new subject, exchanging the positions of the subjectand predicate. Secondly, translate the passive sentence into sentence with no subject in Chinese. Thirdly, translate it into determinative-sentence. The final way is to translate the sentence into passive voice with Chinese characters like “被” and “由”, etc.
...........
Chapter Five Conclusion
After translation, proofreading, and the process of writing the report, the translator has found that there are many shortcomings that should be overcome in the future, which mainly includes: First, the translator should increase the accumulation of basic knowledge of English and Chinese for further improvement, and also need to increase the reading quantity in order to develop a better sense of language and literary works. Along with the actual situation of the task, it is very important for translators to express the emotion of the source text by getting better understanding of the original language. Second, the translator should cultivate an accurate understanding of the source text. The comprehension process of the source text is not only a reflection of the text, but also a process of realizing the readers’ feeling. What is important for the translator is to get a full comprehension of the source text that may reflect the author's thoughts in translation. Third, the translator needs to know well of the correct use of Chinese characters “地”, so as to use it correctly in both translation and writing in the future. During translating and writing, the translator not only learned how to apply translation theories to the translation practice, but also deepened her understanding the ways in which translation theories and techniques are applied in the process of translating.
.............
參考文獻(略)
本文編號:11671
本文鏈接:http://www.wukwdryxk.cn/waiyulunwen/waiyufanyi/11671.html