A Report On The Translation Of Can’t Hurt Me In Light Of Relevance Translation Theory

Can’t Hurt Me is an autobiography written by David Goggins,a retired US Navy SEAL member.For David Goggins,childhood was a dark time filled with physical abuse and prejudice.However,with incredible strength of will,this once-hopeless boy pulled himself out of his childhood nightmare and transformed himself into a US Armed Force icon and one of the world’s top endurance athletes.The growth of David Goggins greatly inspires and encourages the teenagers,and its practical significance arouses the translation interest of the translator.Under the guidance of relevance translation theory,the report tries to figure out the most suitable translation methods by probing the translation text from three aspects:lexical aspect,syntactic aspect and rhetorical aspect.The translation difficulties are mainly reflected in the translation of culture-loaded words and the choice of word meaning of polysemous words.The expression of sentences and the use of rhetorics reflect the differences in Chinese and western ways of thinking and the cognitive contexts.Relevance translation theory holds that translation means elucidation of the source text.The translator should work hard to deduce the implied communicative intention of the source text.By this means,optimal relevance will be achieved between the source text and the target text to generate the most faithful contextual effect.On lexical aspect,the translator mainly analyzes culture-loaded words and polysemous words from three aspects:choice of word meaning,substitution and annotation.In this way,the translator provides adequate contextual effect for the target readers,empowering the target readers to understand the author’s communicative intention with minimal processing effort.On syntactic aspect,the translator studies difficult sentences by means of division,addition,omission,extension and transformation of narrative perspective.The translator flexibly changes sentence patterns according to the context and Chinese and English expression habits,so as to make the translation conform to the reading habits of the target readers and achieve optimal relevance.In terms of rhetorical aspect,simile,metaphor,metonymy and other rhetorics are used in the source text.The translator appropriately converts and extends the rhetorics in order to reproduce the writing style and communicative intention of the source text.In this translation practice,the translator carefully read the source text and the parallel texts,and proposed the corresponding translation methods according to the characteristics of the autobiographies and the translation difficulties of the source text,hoping to provide a reference for the translators of autobiographies.At the same time,the translator has a deeper understanding of autobiography translation.On the basis of accurately conveying the communicative intention of the author,the translator hopes to convey David’s sprit of perseverance in the face of adversity to the target readers to encourage them to explore their potential and keep making progress.