Chapter 1 Introduction
Among all translations of different types of writing, the literary translation, so tospeak, has the highest degree of difficulty. A qualified literary translator needs not onlythe solid basic skill of bilingualism, but also the acquirement and flexible applicationof general knowledge of translation techniques. In the process of translating literaryworks, translators have often agonized over how to deal with different kinds ofdifficult sentences. A difficult sentence often has complex structure and vaguesemantic meaning, so it is difficult to find a corresponding translation havingconsistent style, faithful semantic meaning and is also up to the standard of the targetlanguage. Sometimes when it comes to difficult sentences, people would think of longsentences immediately. That’s right, long sentences with complex structures areannoying and daunting, but some sentences with only simple words or structures leavetranslators with nowhere to start.Therefore, the translation of difficult sentences is a big problem which needsfurther serious discussion in the research of translation, especially in the research oftranslation techniques. The author has accumulated some experience after she finishedtranslating several chapters of Olive Kitteridge, written by Elizabeth Strout. Closelycombined with the translation experience, this research will have a discussion of somecertain difficult sentences in the text mentioned above. The author will also sum upsome useful and operational translation techniques when dealing with difficult Englishsentences from her own experience. This thesis firstly classifies and analyzes thedifficult sentences appearing in the text, then summarizes language features ofdifferent kinds of difficult sentences, and finally comes up with different translationtechniques with pertinence according to the different features and testifies the rational,practical applicability, operability and repeatability of those translation techniquesthrough rich examples picked up from the text. Thus the perceptual knowledge acquired from the author’s translation practice goes up to the rational knowledge oftranslation techniques.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
Loads of textbooks and academic works about “how to translate” and “how totranslate well” have been published in recent years. And almost every work would talkabout how to translate difficult sentences. The discussions about translating difficultsentences are involved in all respects, but at the moment the main research angle hasfocused on the analysis of the structure of difficult sentences. For example, WangLinxia (2009) once put forward that we should first figure out the grammar structure ofa sentence, and second find out the central content of the whole sentence and meaningsof every layer, then analyze the mutual logical relations between the layers and finallytranslate the source text correctly in accordance with the features and means ofexpression of Chinese. The form of the translation does not need to be bound by that ofthe source text.Another example is from Zhou Jianjun (2004), who come up with the “Six Steps”and the “Six Approaches” to solve the problem of translating long and difficult Englishsentences into Chinese. The “Six Steps” consists of abstracting the main structure ofsubject-verb-object, analyzing words and phrases, differentiating the principal and thesubordinate, smoothing out levels, adjusting collocation and polishing words andphrases. The first four steps are called “the stage of comprehending”. It means thatthey are carried out to have a full and clear comprehension toward the meaning of thesource sentence, which establishes the foundation for the next move. The last two stepsare called “the stage of expression”. It is to express the understood meaning of theEnglish source sentence into a clear and complete Chinese sentence. After the first foursteps, the translation has entered into the stage of comprehending, which is step fi
