A Report On The Translation Of This Boy:A Memoir Of A Childhood

This thesis is a report on the translation of This Boy:A Memoir of a Childhood, written by British former Home Secretary-Alan Johnson. This book is Alan’s autobiography, mainly talking about his experience at childhood and teenager and its background spanned from 1950s to 1960s in Britain. Alan was born in England in 1950 when Britain was still recovering from the Second Word War. There used to be a slum in west London, which was called Notting Hill now and where Alan spent his childhood. Except bothering with grinding poverty, Alan also experienced the shock of his parents’ divorce and the early death of his mother. Then his three-year-older sister assumed the responsibility and burden of the family, taking care of her younger brother and sustaining the fragmented family. Alan recalled and described these two strong and extraordinary female affectionately in this novel.As this book described the social life and mentality of British people after the Second Word War vividly, it received extensive attention and resonance of people. This book can be representative of literary works and British cultural background. Therefore, I hoped to gasp a deep and systematic knowledge of methods and skills of literary works’ translation through translating this book. In this report, I made a detailed and systematic conclusion of the translation skills of autobiographies based on this translation practice and related translation theories.There are three parts of this report:the first part is description of this translation task, making an introduction to this book and its author, then relating the reasons and significance of translating this book. The second part is about the translation process, describing the process in detail from three phases:preparation before translation, process during translation and proofreading and revising after translation. The third part is case analysis. I summarized and analyzed those difficulties and problems I have met during translation from the aspects of stylistic features, lexical and syntactic level and the difficulties of translating this book and I also pointed out the skills and solutions to solve these problems.