A Report On Translating Charles W. Eliot (Chapter â… )

This report is based on the translation practice of Charles W. Eliot (Volume I--Chapter I), which is a non-fictional biography work. It firstly analyzes the features of non-fictional biography texts and translation standards. Then under the guidance of the skopos theory and its rules, the author details her choices of translation methods to different problems during the translation process in order to make the translated text meet the expected demands.Charles W. Eliot tells the epic story of the 21st president of Harvard College and his outstanding contributions to higher education reforms, which holds lessons for domestic university development. In addition, this biography has won the writer Henry James the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and Autobiography while there is no Chinese version of this book published in our country. This documentary biography is something between a practical writing and a literary work, which contains both authenticity and literariness. It requires the target text to perform the informative and expressive functions of the original work.According to the skopos theory, translation strategies and methods are dominated by purposes of the translation task. Besides, the coherence rule and fidelity rule set a standard for the target text. The author firstly defines the translation purposes and the expected readers of the target text. Then she reads some excellent Chinese versions of different biographies which have won great popularity in China. Based on above, the translator should not only convey facts and details of original work faithfully, but also have to fulfill the communicative function of target text with literary flavor. In order to make the translated version more acceptable to Chinese readers, the author employs the domestication strategy in the translation practice.The main body of this report deals with typical case studies at levels of words, sentences, annotation and literariness. These examples explain how to choose appropriate methods to achieve a certain purpose, which is making the hero of this biography and its original information understood by target readers at the greatest extent.