An E-C Translation Report Of What The Night Knows(Chapters1-7)

The writing of this English-Chinese translation report is based on the translation of What the Night Knows(Chapters 1-7)as the source text.This book is a thriller written by the American thriller master Dean Koontz and it tells the whole process of solving serial murder cases.The original text contains a lot of dialogues,environmental description and character description.Therefore,the translator needs to pay special attention to retain the feeling of suspicion and tension in the original text.In the process of producing the translation,the translator encounters a variety of actual difficulties,such as,the differences between English and Chinese language and lack of the relevant knowledge about western culture.Hence the objective of this translation report is to analyze the difficulties met in the translation and the corresponding methods the translator implemented to deal with these problems.The difficulties are divided into three categories,which are lexical,syntactic and textual difficulties.The former contains the difficulties in translating culture-loaded words,weapons and equipment terms,parts of speech,and polysemous words.And the methods of adding footnotes,adding footnotes with illustrations,conversion of parts of speech and extension of word meaning are adopted to solve the problem in lexical aspect.The syntactic difficulties include the translation of semantic understanding difficulties and the colloquial expression of direct speech.To cope with these two kinds of sentences,the translator adopts translation of splitting translation and omission.And the method of the use of onomatopoeia and four-character structure and adaptation are taken to tackle the difficulties met in textual aspect,including the translation of suspense atmosphere and character description.Through this translation practice,the translator finds that different translations can bring out great differences in the effect of expression and the response of the reader.Therefore the translator should always pay attention to the degree of equivalence between the translation and the original text in the process of translation.According to the atmosphere of the novel,the translator should try to preserve thehorror and suspense effect of the original text,choose the appropriate expression,study the details of the original text in depth,and adopt the appropriate translation strategy.