A Comparative Study Of The Translations Of The Complex Sentences In The Chinese, English And Japanese Versions Of Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone

The "Harry Potter" series are popular all over the world, and researchers have studied it from different perspectives, including the perspective of translation studies. There are a great many non-English readers who read Harry Potter in their own mother tongues. Therefore, translation takes an important part in the prevalence of Harry Potter besides the reason of the work itself and the commercial promotion.In order to observe the similarities and differences in the different versions of the work, we chose the English, Chinese and Japanese versions from more than sixty versions as the sample. The three versions refer to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone published by Scholastic Inc.,哈利·波特与魔法石published by People's Literature Publishing House, and (?) published by Say-zan-sha Publications Ltd. The focus is on the complex sentences in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, with an aim to summarize the translation methods of complex sentences used by the translators. We then made a comparison of the versions and evaluated the translation versions according to the translation norm of "faithfulness and fluency"The thesis is made up of six parts. The first chapter is an introduction of the study, the second chapter being a literature review, and the third chapter is a comparison of complex sentences in English, Chinese and Japanese. The fourth is a statistics of the complex sentences in the three versions of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and a summary of translation methods. The fifth chapter is a translation criticism of the translations based on the translation norm of "faithfulness and fluency", and the last part draws a conclusion of this thesis.This thesis summarizes the translation methods of different types of the complex sentences in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, compares the differences and similarities of complex sentences in English, Chinese and Japanese, expecially from the aspects of weight tendencies and word order, and analyzes the unfaithful and unfluent translations in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. It is expected to be useful to the translation pratice by analyzing sentence structures.