A Report On The Translation Of Bestsellers From The Perspective Of Memetics

The translation material of this report is excerpted from three chapters of Live it! Achieve Success by Living With Purpose, one of the Amazon bestsellers, whose author is Jairek Robbins. With the topic of "how to pursue success", the excerpted chapters concentrate on explaining the ways of achieving ideal life, differentiating majors and minors in life and giving various character-shaping methods. Meanwhile, the language of the translation material is easy to understand, and its colloquial expression is a typical feature of the bestsellers. Therefore, this material is highly worth translating from both the realistic and the linguistic perspectives.The present report consists of five parts:introduction, memetics, source text, the translation strategies under the guidance of memetics and summary. The first part generalizes the features of bestsellers, the necessity of translating bestsellers and the reasons of taking memetics as the guidance of this translation practice. The second part displays the origin and development of memetics as well as its applications in the translation study. The third part focuses on the linguistic characteristics of translation material. The fourth part is the main body of this report, which analyzes the translation strategies of the source text under the guidance of memetics. With the help of the concept "strong meme " and "equivalent meme" in memetics, the translation practice has been carried out smoothly, so that the linguistic meme in source text could be spread effectively. Besides, based on the strategies summarized in the book Memes of Translation, this report explains how the strategies were used from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels by examples from the translation materials. The last part summarizes the approaches to solving the problems in the course of translating practice.This translating practice offered a great opportunity for the translator to have a further understanding on how to translate bestsellers. The practice is beneficial for the improvement of the translating ability, and the translating skills and approaches illustrated in this report are expected to be helpful for other translators.