A Report On The Translation Of Chapters 1-4 Of Educated:A Memoir

This thesis is a translation report and the source text is excerpted from Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover,an American writer.This book topped The New York Times bestseller list in 2018 and tells the process of the self-consciousness shaping and the growth under the strict family discipline which was divorced from the society.Through the pursuit of education and freedom,Tara finally broke the shackles of her original family.This translation aims to enlighten readers for the reason that the self-achievement process of the author is truly inspiring,and a certain person's education is inextricably linked with his or her life.As an autobiographical novel,the book owns both authenticity and literariness.Based on the theory of communicative translation firstly introduced in the book Approaches to Translation in 1988 by Peter Newmark,which focus on conveying the messages of the original text in line with the form of the linguistic,cultural and pragmatic conventions of the target language that both language and contents are acceptable and comprehensible to the readership,the translator has translated the first four chapters of the book into Chinese with a total of 14442 words in the original text.This report consists of five parts.The first part mainly introduces the background of the translation materials,the significance of the translation project and the framework of this report.The second part includes a brief introduction to the author,an overview of the source text and an analysis of the language style.The third part introduces the guiding theory of this translation practice and the translation process.The fourth part mainly analyzes the translation difficulties and the corresponding solutions.Considering the language style of memoirs and the cultural background knowledge contained in the source text,the difficulties focus on the translation of proper nouns,parentheses,characters' dialogues.Under the guidance of communicative translation theory,in order to smooth the reading process of the target readers,the translator applied the annotation to the translation of proper nouns.In order to recreate the authenticity of this memoir,the translator paid attention to the reconstruction of the sentences when translating theparentheses.Besides,the technique of amplification is used to enhance the emotional expression of characters in dialogues.The last part is the conclusion of the translation practice,including the practical gains acquired from this project and the deficiencies owing to the limitation on the translator's abilities and capacity.Through the analysis of this practice,the translator accumulated more experience of solving problems in the translation process under the theoretical guidance and making the translation smooth and natural.