Report On The Translation Of Biographical Literature Becoming Steve Jobs

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Revolution of A Reckless Upstart into A Visionary Leader,written by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is an excellent biography, objectively and vividly depicting Steve Jobs in life and in work. A biography, as a piece of non-fiction works, is a detailed description of a person’s life, involving many basic facts like education, work,relationships, etc. Biographical literature plays an important role in cross culture communication for its function of education and inspiration. Therefore, a further study on biographical literature translation is still in want.Based on the first two chapters of the biography the writer has translated, this report explores the translation strategies of biographical literature at lexical and phrasal level, syntactic level and discoursal level from the perspective of Newmark’s Semantic and Communicative Translation Theory. With a combination of the two translation strategies, two specific translation principles are mainly followed and discussed in this report:(1) contextualization of word choice,expression and syntactic arrangement;(2) reader-oriented principle on lexical and phrasal,syntactic and discoursal levels. The writer offered her Chinese version and displayed her understanding and commentary in the hope of exercising her translation competence and deepening her translation study as well as providing some reference to people interested in this book and those interested in translation and study of biographical literature.