| This report is based on the translation of an excerpt from The Life She Wished to Live:A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,Author of The Yearling by Ann McCutchan,which is a record of how Marjorie finished her novel The Yearling and won the Pulitzer Prize for the most distinguished novel of 1938.This translation aims to introduce this great work to Chinese readers so that they can learn more about American literature and culture.Through this report,the translator also hopes to offer a trustworthy reference to the translation of other biographies.Biographical works are usually non-fiction,but fiction,as a literary device,can also be used to portray a celebrity’s life.As a biography,The Life She Wished to Live is informative,and mainly gives a description of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her works.The book is also a great work with literary characteristics and the author’s writing style should be put emphasis on.While translating the text,the translator has the obligation to remove the language barrier so that not only does the language meaning emerge but also the style of the source text remains.As Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory makes a positive contribution to translating words,phrases and sentences,this translation,with the ordinary educated Chinese as its target readers,is proceeding under its guidance.The report involves level shifts and category shifts,offering specific translation methods with regard to various shift difficulties.As for the level shifts,shifts of tense and aspect to lexis,shifts of singular and plural forms to lexis are referred to;as for the category shifts,shifts between active voice and passive voice,conversion,shifts of language units and shifts of idioms are mentioned.The idea of "shift" enables the translator to convey the source text to target readers by discarding the form of the source text,and the translation shifts theory has a high instructive value in the translation of biographies in different levels and ranks. |
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