A Report On The Translation Of The First Three Chapters Of When The Lights Go On Again

This is a report on the English- Chinese translation of the first three chapters of When the Lights Go on Again by an English novelist Annie Groves. The novel is a story about each member of a given family defending their country during the World War Ⅱ. Although there were so many conflicts between the parents and children, or between the brother and the sister, even between lovers, each of them showed their love in different ways.The novel is characterized by dialogues and psychological activities of characters, which makes it a great challenge for the translator as to how to make the rendering naturally coherent, so that Chinese readers can feel as if they are reading the original version. Therefore,this report makes an analysis of the basic translating skills adopted in the transcripts with a lot of specific examples. Furthermore, with the difference of subject-prominence and topic-prominence between English and Chinese, the author makes use of topic chain to reconstruct paragraphs and texts in the course of translation.The report is composed of six parts: the first part is about the translation task description, that is, a general introduction about the selection of the text; and the second part is about the translation process, including pre-translation, translation and the selection of translating strategy; the rest three parts are translation process, case study of the basic translating skills involved as well as an analysis of the key issues during the translating process.