A Report On Translation Of Creatures Of The Earth

This report is based on Creatures of the Earth which is one of the short stories in The Collected Stories written by John McGahern. This translation report is aimed to explore the long and complex sentences in the short novel. There are different kinds of subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases in those sentences which brings great difficulties to the translator. Therefore the translator should not only be capable of analyzing elements and logical relationship of sentences in the original text but also have the ability of language competence in the translated text.Long and complex sentences account for fifty percent of all kinds of sentence patterns in Creatures of the Earth, which brings many difficulties to understand and translate for the translator. Translation techniques will be summarized after analyzing several typical cases in this novel.The report firstly introduces the writer, John McGahern and this novel. In addition, translation difficulties which are how to understand those long and complex sentences are also discussed. Chapter two gives a brief introduction to the preparation before translation. The third chapter explores the ways of understanding the long and complex sentence, including its logic, meaning and structure. The forth chapter is case study. By looking into several examples, translation steps are explored when translating long and complex sentences under various circumstances. The last chapter is the conclusion of the whole report. When translating the long and complex sentence, on one hand, the translator should understand its logic, meaning and structure. On the other hand, the translator summarizes some useful translation techniques.