A Report On The Translation Of It Can’t Happen Here

The writer’s translation task “It Can’t Happen Here” is part of the translation projectbetween Henan University and the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Theauthor Sinclair Lewis is the first Nobel prize winner of America and also a satirist，whoselanguage characterized with vividness and humor. Lewis and his works are the symbolizationof a period of American history and an epitome of art. The writer translated from the firstchapter to the fourth chapter, which mainly introduced the background of the story and is ofgreat importance to the whole book.In the Bilingual Project of the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, itexplains that the mainly form of these translations are E-book, bilingual parallel corpus and soon, so it requires the translator try to transmit the information of the source text faithfully andwithout inter-interpreting and expression. Due to this purpose, the translation based on literaltranslation and expressed the source text faithfully, which also reflected the characteristics ofthe source text.The humorous characteristics of the fiction and plenty of long sentences are of greatdifficulty to the translation. The author read it repeatedly and consulted much informationabout the book. In this paper, the theory “similarity in spirit” and “similarity in form” wasused, the translation strategy transition of the property of the words was adopted, and somelong sentence structures were adjusted to solve the problems in the translation.Translation is to express and reflect the thought and emotion characteristics written by onelanguage creatively with another language, which is a complex language activity. Through thetranslation of this fiction, the writer realized the difficulty of literary translation. Thetranslator also should know clear about the author’s writing style, language characteristics, writing background, relative culture and literary quotation and so on. The writer willaccumulate miscellaneous knowledge, enlarge the scope of knowledge and combine thetranslation theory with the translation practice.