A Report On Translating Marilyn Monroe: The Biography(excerpts)

Marilyn Monroe: The Biography is written by famous American biographer Donald Spoto, who has gathered large quantity of first-hand material to recreate an honest image of Marilyn and her course of life. Also, Marilyn?s adorers give high praises for this book, so the book is considered worth reading.Biography has a long history in the literary tradition of both China and the West. As the combination of history and literature, biography embodies both historic feature and literary flavor. During the translation process, the translator should take the text?s informative and expressive features into consideration seriously. After the World War Ⅱ, more and more people have been involving themselves into biographical literature, and it has become a new hot topic in the study of literature in the West. In this report, the translator has chosen chapter 5 the first half of chapter 6 in Marilyn Monroe: The Biography as translation material, which is about the first marriage of Marilyn.During the translation process, the translator found that the most difficult part is to understand the adjectives in the text comprehensively and to translate them properly. So the translator paid special attention on translating adjectives in the process. Under the guidance of former study in adjectives, the adjectives are divided into two groups, which are static adjective and dynamic adjective. Then according to several translation skills(the conversion, choice of word meaning from the context and the amplification), the translator analysed some examples from the text. In the last part, the translator made a conclusion on the translation practice.