Introduction
It is known to us that there are various different kinds of genres in literature and different genres seem to vary from one another more or less. There is no doubt that translation and transformation happen a lot if one would like to make a certain genre become another genre. However, translation and transformation may not always take effect and only successful translation and transformation can make another produced genre work. Therefore this paper would like to translate and transform one post on social media to personal story, during which the process and skills of translation and the analysis of the characteristics of both genres will be elaborated on.
The specific post on social media that is chosen is a picture posted by Salmaan Bhati, on which it reads “People don’t care for you when you are alone. They just care for you when they are alone” (2018). It is hoped that this translation and transformation can give some insightful suggestions as for how to successfully translate and transform one genre into another in the due time.
Translation and Transformation
Firstly, I have to say that the first moment when I encounter the sentence on the post, I directly relate it to my personal story because I have personal experience of this sentence. The more detailed condition is that when I was at home in China, I was accompanied by my parents and there were many friends beside me. Based on this, a fair knowledge can be obtained that I felt alone quite less. However, Amanda, one of my best friends, lived with her grandparents at that time because her parents worked outside in order to support the whole household. Due to her grandparents’ home was a little remote from our school, she didn’t make many friends at school. As a result, she tent to rely on me a lot and she would contact me whenever she was alone. Looking back upon afterwards, I had to say that the frequency that she contacted me at that period was pretty high and we kept in close touch with one another.
At that time, I would offer help to her within my own ability and I often replied to her as soon as possible. And I always tried my best to comfort her that her parents would come back soon and everything would be okay then so she just had to wait for the coming back of her parents. Luckily, she really survived those days and her parents finally came back to work and she became more and more attached to her parents as time went by. Later on, she began to contact me less from before and she didn’t rely on me as much as in the past.
However, the case is completely the opposite when I came to this foreign country to study. In the first beginning, it was really a strange and new place for me and I had to adjust myself in order that I could quickly fit into this country. But I had to admit that even though I had spared no efforts in adjusting myself, I still felt alone quite easily in this new country. Thus I increased the frequency to contact my parents back at home. Apart from that, I as well contacted more frequently with Amanda, hoping that she could provide me more emotional support. Nevertheless, what was out of my expectation is that she didn’t reply to me as timely as I did when she was alone and sometimes she even replied to me several days later. At last, she just didn’t respond to me at all and I could get no support from her for even a little.
Under this condition, I quickly detected the great differences between the reaction of Amanda when she was alone and when I was alone and she seemed to care about me much less than I took after her when she was alone. As a matter of fact, I even felt sort of unworthy for me to devote so much of my past time in comforting her while I quickly brought me back to the track and not continue that kind of negative thoughts anymore. What I have learned from this issue is that people only find you when you are in need and they may not be your side when you are in need, which is right what has been indicated by the sentence in the post that “People don’t care for you when you are alone. They just care for you when they are alone” (Salmaan Bhati. 2018).
With the translated and transformed version of personal story mentioned at length in the above, what follows will be the interpretation of the process and skills of translation and the analysis of the characteristics of both genres. Roman Jakobson states that there are three kinds of translation in his work On Linguistic Works of Translation in 1959 and they are respectively intralingual translation, interlingual translation and intersemiotic translation. Intralingual translation means translation happens by commenting, expanding, paraphrasing, rewording, summarizing within a language. And as to interlingual translation, it refers to the traditional concept of translation from the source text to the target text. When it comes to the intersemiotic translation, it actually means the translation that occurs by changing the written text into a different form, such as art or dance or medium (Roman Jakobson. 1959).
Detailed speaking, the process of translation involved is actually to expand the post on Facebook so as to make it a sentence that has supportive examples. Or maybe it can be put in another way that the post on Facebook can be seen as the main idea of my personal story and my personal story is right based on the post on Facebook. To put Roman Jakobson’s theory into this case, it is apparent that the kind of translation occurs here is the intralingual translation because of the existence of translation is based on expanding. Based on this, it is not hard to find that the skills of translation and transformation required is to firstly understand the connotations of the post on Facebook so that suitable personal story can be produced after understanding the connotations, otherwise appropriate personal story won’t be possible to be created at all.
As a matter of fact, the word “presuppositions” can effectively deliver this point in that presuppositions mean the common language assumed in the source text, which should be known by the audience before they would like to translate and transform