Strategies For Translating Long Sentences From English To Chinese In Literary Works And Reproducing Stylistic Features At The Syntactic Level

This report is based on my translation of a novella Herbert West-the Reanimator,which is one representative work of Howard Philips Lovecraft,an American writer of horror and science fiction.The original is a horror novella which tells a story about the forbidden area of science.In the original text,Lovecraft adopts many long sentences which contain much information to create an atmosphere of terror or provide a detailed description of the horror itself for the readers' imagination.In the translating process,I fully understand that the biggest difference between English and Chinese is that the former pays attention to hypotaxis while the latter focuses on parataxis.I find that Lovecraft does not use long sentences and short sentences interchangeably but more long sentences than short ones in the source text.That turns out to be the most outstanding stylistic feature of the source text.The focus of this report is on how to translate these long sentences from English into Chinese and how to reproduce the stylistic features of the source text at the syntactic level.After conducting extensive researches,five strategies for translating long sentences from English to Chinese are found to be helpful,namely,following the original order,reversing,splitting,inserting,and combining the strategies/recasting.This report gives an introduction to the mentioned strategies and makes a conclusion after analyzing them in the part of case study.At the same time,I conduct an analysis of the source text from the perspective of stylistics at the syntactic level so as to reproduce the stylistic features or literary effect of the original.This report concludes that,in translating long sentences from English to Chinese,in order to ensure the meanings are conveyed correctly in the target text and the stylistic features are retained to the maximum extent,translators should fully understand the differences between English and Chinese,analyze the grammatical structure of long sentences,choose proper strategies,and be aware of the literary effect the writer aims to convey by using long sentences.