A Report On The Translation Of Haunted Heart—The Life And Times Of Stephen King(chapters 1-3)

This report intends to analyze the present author's Chinese translation of the introduction and the first three chapters of Haunted Heart—The Life and Times of Stephen King,the first biography of the world's famous thriller writer Stephen King,which was written by Lisa Rogak.The introduction of the said biography is an overview of Stephen King's whole life as well as his works,and the first three chapters narrate Stephen King's family background,childhood,his interest in reading and talent about writing thriller stories,and some of his early experiences in university.The language of the biography is plain and easy to understand.Based on her translation practice,the author will report the difficulties,both at the lexical level and at the syntactic level,she encountered during the translation process.At the lexical level,the difficulties mainly include the translation of polysemy,proper nouns and vulgarities and,in order to solve such difficulties,the translator turned to Gutt's(2000)Relevance Translation Theory,which mainly includes Cognitive Environment,Contextual Effect and Principle of Optimal Relevance,for help.At the syntactic level,the difficulties mainly lie in the translation of sayings,slang and long sentences,and the translator tried to handle them under the guidance of both the Relevance Translation Theory and Catford's(1965)Shift Theory,which further contains Level Shifts,Class Shifts,Structure Shifts and Unit Shifts.To be more specific,the translator adopted some translation methods and skills,such as literal translation,free translation,amplification and division,to improve the translation.The translation report intends to reflect how the translator has applied translation theories to practice in the translation process and how she has struggled to polish her translation under theoretical guidance by comparing her first translation and revised translation of the source text.However,the report as well as the translation itself has a lot to be desired,and the translator still needs to learn more translation theories and carry out more translation practices to further improve her translation level.