A Report On The Translation Of Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography (Chapter5-8)

The social cultural soil worshiping high spirit of individualism has given birth to thetypical American autobiography complex and therefore, various sorts of autobiography textswith American characteristics have came into existence. In recent years, with theever-accelerated economic and cultural globalization trend, there emerged celebrityautobiographies concerning self-promoting and extending individuality, which have becomeshining cultural scenery in modern literary world. In the context of the mass culture, celebrityautobiographies abound in retrofit. In terms of form, it displays a trend of diversification. Interms of content, it characterized by the diversification of narrative perspective, prosaictendency structure and plurality of language, in order to achieve the purposes of advertisingindividuality and increasing biography writers’ affinity.Standing between literary biography and historical biography, despite autobiographykeep peculiar tension between reality and fabrication, it also needs to be translated so as tocreate the effect of celebrity, commerce and culture. This thesis attempts to applySkopostheorie as instructive theory, and studying the translation strategies of autobiographytranslation by relying on the translation task: Rob Low’s Stories I only Tell my Friends: anAutobiography. The thesis is expected as a reference of improving the quality ofautobiography translation, to achieve its marketization and commercial value.The thesis consists of four parts: The first part mainly introduces the origin of thetranslation task, information of the writer and his work, the type and characteristics of thenovel; the second part describes the undertaken translation process including preparation, thedifficulties and problems encountered, proofreading and improvement of the first draft; thethird part states the main ideas of Skopostheorie utilized by the author and undertakes case analysis of the translation methods and strategies via the combination of the concreteexamples in the translation task; the fourth part discusses the apperception and experiencegained in the translation practice respectively from two aspects: the necessity of translationtheory to guide practice and translators’ personal accomplishment, and makes asummarization.The author profoundly perceives that practice, theory and strategy are indispensable inthe process of translation. High sense of responsibility, solid bilingual language foundation,extensive knowledge scope and good professional ethics are necessary. The author hopes thatthrough the efforts of this paper, the level of actual autobiographical literary translation wouldbe improved. It is also expected that more researchers will devote their efforts to thisemerging area for deeper insights.