Translating A Difficult but Interesting Job.
It's my first time to have the chance to translate a book with a group of classmates, besides the feeling of exciting, I feel this job really challenging and of course not very easy. Since, for me, I haven't had much practice on translating works before. So first, I should thank Professor Tang for giving us this chance to improve our study of English and leading us with a good starting to the translation field. .
The book our group worked on is one of a series of children's horror fictions. Though the fiction that is named 'The Curse of Mummy's Tomb' seems to me easy enough to read and understand, during the two months of translating work, it turned out to be a tough work! To be exact, a tough work with much interest. What I felt and gained from the this job during the two months working can be divided into several aspects as follows:.
What difficulties I encountered during the working on translating.
¤ Language the speaking language which is hard to accurately translate.
¤ Content the story is based on the children's thoughts that are difficult to grasp.
¤ Words many slangs, phrases and informal words that are not familiar are used.
¤ Sentence some sentences are really short and some are extremely long, both of which are hard to get meaning and translate.
First, I will talk about the language. The language used in this horror fiction is mostly speaking language and the conversation between characters. For instance, when Ahmed frightened little Sari, she cried to her Dad Daddy he's going to kill us! And then turn us into mummies!' and this was translated into "ÖÖ û ªÉ ±ÃÎaÇ £áÈ » ∘oÑÎaÇ ±ãÉÄ ¾ÄÃ". When translating speaking language, we should think of what we speak in daily life. E.g. We were no match for Ahmed', there was no telling what he would do to us.
