A Practice Report On The Translation Of Long And Complex Sentences In Edinburgh Twilight(Excerpts) Under The Guidance Of Skopos Theory

It is a practical report on translation of Edinburgh Twilight by Carole Lawrence.This novel told stories of a serial murder cases in Edinburgh.After a victim was found in the Holyrood Park,the protagonist Ian Hamilton faced continuous murder cases.Under the limited clues,he analyzed carefully and finally found the truth.The mystery novel is a kind of narrative text,which takes the narration as its content.With a large number of short dialogues and long and complex sentences,the language of this kind of text is interesting,narrative and logic.Due to the connections among paragraphs,long and complex sentences also have strong logic in specific contexts.Therefore,after consideration,the author decides to use skopos theory as the theoretical guidance to translate the selected chapters.In the middle and late of the last century,the concept of “Skopos Theory” was initially put forward.It requires that the content of the translation text should be faithful to the original text,and the sentence pattern should be smooth,but the core requirement is that everything should follow the “purpose” of translation.He believed that among the three rules of purpose,coherence and fidelity,the skopos rule should be the most important principle.As the translation of long and complex sentences has always been a headache,the translator takes it as the target for study and analysis.At the same time,considering the original author’s literary achievements,the content of the narrative text,and the target reader’s preference for the mystery theme;the translator decides to analyze the prologue and the first four chapters of the text.Besides,some methods like sequencing,reversing and splitting will be applied for the analysis and translation of long and complex sentences.Finally,the translator believes skopos theory has certain guiding significance for the translation of the narrative text,and hopes that this report will provide reference for the translation of narrative texts in the future.