A Report On The Translation Of Be Careful What You Wish For (Chapter 17-32)

This paper is a report on the translation of Be Careful What You Wish For(excerpts), the fourth volume of Jeffrey Archer‘s Clifton Chronicles, a New York Times bestseller. Published worldwide in March 2014, the book is a work of popular fiction which tells the story of the Clifton and Barrington families during the years 1957 to 1964.From the perspective of information structure, both English and Chinese share the given-before-new and end-focus principles in delivering a message. Therefore, in order to produce a target text that can better keep the original information flow and achieve a higher degree of smoothness in information communication, the author of the present report basically adopts the strategy of following the original syntactic order to deal with relative clauses introduced by “who” and passive structures with agent. Based on this general principle, he employs the method of combination, separation, omission, anaphoric reference or turning attributive clauses into adverbial ones, if such a need arises, to tackle the former sentence type, and in the case of the latter one, it is the method of using emphatic structures, reinventing sentence structures or turning phrases into clauses that comes into assistance. The body of this report consists of four parts. Chapter One is project description. Chapter Two is concerned with the translation process. Chapter Three is the key part in which the author introduces some basic ideas of information structure and discusses the translation methods in specific cases. Chapter Four is a summary of the findings and limitations of this report.