A Report On The E-C Translation Of Memoir I Was Better Last Night:A Memoir (Excerpt) From The Perspective Of Attitude

As a sub-genre of biography,memoirs are characterized by authenticity,literariness and subjectivity.Memoirs written by those Western authors can present a more intuitive and realistic western world for Chinese readers,and also provide a window for them to understand western culture,thus enhancing cultural exchanges between China and the West.Although there are some researches about memoir translation in domestic and foreign studies,they mostly focus on the comparative analysis of translation and there are few studies guiding translation practice of such texts.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct an in-depth study on the translation of memoirs,both from the perspective of readership and translation practice.This E-C translation report is based on attitude in appraisal theory to analyze the translation in the book I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir by Harvey Fierstein,an American actor and playwright,for exploring how to represent the author’s attitude through vocabulary,syntax and other attitudinal resources to express his attitude toward life and society.This memoir is full of humorous expressions and the author uses a lot of attitudinal resources to show his affect,judgement and appreciation of people,events and objects,and presents the readers unforgettable life experience.Therefore,the major difficulties in translating this memoir will be how to reproduce the author’s subjective emotions,feelings and attitudes,and how to reproduce the author’s personal writing style.This report is intended to draw translators’ attention to the subjective nature of the memoir text in the translation process,to explore how the author conveys feelings,attitudes and values in his lines,and to effectively transform these attitudinal resources through translation,so that the ideas and emotions of the original work can be effectively conveyed in the translation.This report begins with a description of the research background,significance of the report and the structure of this report,followed by descriptions of the preparation,translation process and post-translation work,then a brief introduction of appraisal theory and its three subsystems,namely attitude,engagement and gradation.The three subsystems of attitude,namely affect,judgment,and appreciation,are discussed in detail,and the need for the translator to analyze attitudinal resources from positive and negative perspectives.In the main part of the report,the translator explored how to reproduce attitudinal resources shown by the author in three dimensions—affect,judgment and appreciation based on her own translation practice and analyzed the attitudinal resources in the original text in terms of positive and negative aspects,so as to represent the author’s writing style on the basis of faithfully conveying the author’s attitude.For different attitudinal resources,the translator adopted different translation strategies,methods and techniques.To be specific,the translator adopted the translation strategy of domestication and other translation techniques such as addition,division and shift for the positive attitudinal resources,aiming to make the translation more vivid;while for the negative attitudinal resources,the translator applied translation techniques such as omission,combination and shift.