A Report On The Translation Of Not For Turning: The Life Of Margaret Thatcher(Excerpts)

With the wider spread of the mass culture, biography is becoming more and more popular among general public. The most typical feature of biographical literature lies on its integration of authenticity and literariness. Therefore, it is not strict historical material, but the achievement of literary creation. And it can bring psychological and spiritual pleasure to readers while getting the character’s brief life story across. In spite of its long history and abundant practices, linguistic features as well as theories and skills on the translating of biographical literature have not been widely studied. According to the Skopos Theory proposed by the German Functionalism School, any kind of translation activity is dominated by its purpose.The purpose of a translation determines the strategies and criteria applied in the translation process. Based on the comprehension of linguistic features of biography and the fundamental rules of the Skopos Theory, in this paper, the author selects an English political biography and tries to translate one chapter into Chinese with the purpose to understand the language characteristics of English biography text and summarize the author’s opinions about translation strategies of adjectives from the perspective of the Skopos Theory.This report consists of two parts.The first part is to translate a part of the source text with the help of dictionaries,and the analysis of two kinds of parallel texts,that is,The Downing Street Years and its Chinese version《唐宁街岁月》;the second part focuses on translation strategies of adjectives from the perspective of the Skopos Theory.Through this project,for one thing I hope to improve my translation skills,and learn more about biographical text features.For another,I wish to introduce some outstanding figures and make a little contribution to the cultural exchanges at home and aboard.