Research methods presentation:

My ST is from a book named: from here to there. The book is about jack and his son jon left their jobs, studies, family and friends took six months to drive overland from Melbourne to London. It is a tale of midlife crisis, a father-son bonding, extreme adventure and a supercharged roadtrip, all woven into one life-changing journey. I choose this book as my ST is mainly because there is too much pressure in our real life and we don’t even have time to pursue our dream. The author’s experience is a good example to encourage people to positively face the life and face up to challenge. Also I am a travel enthusiast; I can learn some local conditions and customs from author’s description when they travelling to different places.

During my translation there are three obvious problems. The first one is author’s inner world. The author likes to use interrogative sentences to express his feeling. In ST there is a paragraph; all the sentences in that paragraph are interrogative form. In TL (chinese), interrogative sentence can produce positive meaning, exclamatory meaning or even negative meaning. (Eg: if not now, then when? In this sentence, the author is not going to ask when, he means do it now. The potential meaning is different as the literature meaning). Whether I can correctly understand the author’s potential meanings when I translate these sentences is a big challenge.

Research methods Another problem appeared when I translate the landscape description. The author expresses the beautiful scenery by using serious imaginative metaphors. In order to produce the same effect in the TL, l need to use communicative translation method. Trying to produce TT readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original. It is also testing my Chinese writing skills.

Some part of my ST is highly expressive. The author write these expressive sentences to show his strong political believe and personal advocate. According to Newmark theory, semantic translation is best for expressive text. One of the important features in semantic translation is the personal and individual follows the thought processes of the author. As I cannot agree with some of the author’s opinion, my translation will, to some extent, reflect my own mental and cultural outlook, despite the best of impartial intentions.

Based on these three issues, my theme for the EPT commentary is to handling author’s imaginative and abstract literature writing style in translation. This includes the description of himself and for the surroundings. I will use communicative translation method to go beyond the sentence boundary, and keep textual coherence. Domestication is also the main strategy to translate English idioms which means use some words and expressions with certain cultural color to translate primitive words and expressions. The aim of my TT is trying to accurately convey this dramatic overland journey and retain author’s delicate writing style.#p#分頁標題#e#