A Report On E-C Translation Of The Biographical Text Hidden Valley Road Under The Guidance Of Jiri Levy’s Translation Theory

Biographical work is the product of history and literature,being endowed with authenticity and literariness.Most of translation studies of biographical texts both at home and abroad focus on the fusion of textual authenticity and literary flavor,while what is still poorly discussed is how translators constantly choose in the practice to reproduce features of the original text.Thus,it is a must to conduct more researches on this.Jiri Levy’s translation theory emphasizes that translation is a process in which the translator constantly exerts his or her initiative,and explores the best strategy for the translator to make decisions from micro angles like word,sentence and text style,which are also shared in features of biographical texts.Therefore,this translation theory provides more specific guidance for the translator on how to represent the features of such texts.Under this circumstance,this thesis analyzes the Chinese translation of the prologue,chapter three,and chapter fifteen of Hidden Valley Road from the perspective of Jiri Levy’s translation theory and discusses how to realize historicity and literariness through the translator’s choices in the translation of biographical text,improving the readability of the translated version.Through the analysis of the source text’s features,this thesis concludes translation difficulties are embodied as follows:at the lexical level,there are many culture-loaded words;at the syntactic level,the book adopts various descriptive sentences to highlight the vividness of characters;for the style of the original text,it presents sentences full of rhythm and diverse figures of speech such as parallelism and personification,enhancing the original literary flavor.Under the guidance of Jiri Levy’s translation theory,this thesis based on those translation difficulties put forwards more feasible translation techniques as well as methods from the perspectives of the definitional and selective instructions,the minimax strategy and illusion principle.In terms of culture-loaded words,the translator uses definitional instructions to obtain their basic meanings,and then sets the original context and cultural disparities as selective instructions until having their appropriate expressions.In terms of descriptive sentences,the translator keeps illusion principle which emphasizing the readers’supreme role in her mind,properly divides or inverses those sentences and employs four-character expressions to improve the readability of the translated version,in which the readers’ reading habits,preference,psychologies and others can be considered.In terms of reproducing the original style,the rhetorical devices are kept in translation,but when language purity and style representation are difficult to balance.the translator chooses to maximize the style while minimizing the loss of language value,so the supplementary explanation is added to highlight the easy-to-understand style of the source text.But for those sentences full of rhyme,the translator adopts omission for those secondary expressions to cultivate the conciseness and vividness of the target text as well as the beauty of rhyme.Under the guidance of Jiri Levy’s translation theory,this thesis discusses difficulties in translation biographical texts and explores how the translator makes the most suitable choices to profoundly reproduce features of source texts,hoping to provide a fresh angle for future studies and practice on the translation of biographical texts.