A Report On The Translation Of Sleeping With The Lights On: The Unsetting Story Of Horror (Excerpts)

Huge differences in language and cultural backgrounds between Chinese and English lead to inescapable translation loss on the aspects of semantics,sentence structure and culture.According to Xia Tingde,translators should repair or make up for the possible translation loss or the translation loss that has already taken place in the process of translation.When choosing translation methods,the translator should give priority to language techniques of target language and get help from those of non-target language according to text types and translation purposes.This is a translation report of the chapters excerpted from Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsetting Story of Horror.In the process of translation,the translator analyzes the text features of the source text and finds out that translation loss may take place on three aspects owing to the semantic nonequivalence,syntactic differences and rich cultural elements in the source text.The translator has employed four compensation methods put forward by Xia,compensation by isolation,compensation by integration,compensation with the same device and compensation with a different device.Through these compensation methods,possible translation loss will be largely avoided and the translation text will be rather readable and can convey the original meaning accurately.