A Report On The Translation Of The Crucifix Killer(Excerpts)(Chapter 1-18)

This translation report is based on the translation of Chris Carter‘s detective novel,The Crucifix Killer(Chapter 1 to Chapter 18).With Detective Hunter as its hero,the novel portrayed the story of how he and his partner solved a mysterious series murders case,in which the killer left a crucifix carving on the victims‘ bodies,thus given the name ?the Crucifix Killer?.Information structure theory aims to analyze the information units in people‘s communication,and divide them into new information and known information,while marking the unit that carries the highest information value as the focus.In this way,the communicative intention could be obtained.As a part of information structure,thematic structure contains theme and rheme.It is generally considered that theme is the starting point of a sentence and rheme is the description of the theme.The theme generally carries known information and the rheme carries new information,so as to make the text coherent and smooth.Therefore,the translator adopted the information structure theory,analyzing the focus on the dialogues and the thematic structure of the sentences of spatial descriptions to make the translation natural and coherent.Under the guidance of the theory,the translator has summed up the translation strategies.As for dialogues,the new information,known information and focus should be analyzed,and the strategies of amplification,re-lexicalization and shift of sentence pattern should be adopted to make the translation natural.As for the sentences of spatial description,the thematic structure should be analyzed first,and then the strategies of changing attributives into clauses,changing word orders and syntactic linearity should be adopted to transform it into the preferred sentence structure in Chinese,so as to make the translation more coherent.