A Report On The Translation Practice Of Losing My Virginity (Excerpts)-under The Guidance Of Back-transformation Theory

In recent years,biographies about foreign celebrities,especially from business field and scientific circle are more and more popular among Chinese readers,such as Steve Jobs: A Biography,Biography of Alan Turing and so on.Given this,I chose the first two chapters of Losing My Virginity(about 10,000 words),an autobiography written by Charles Branson,the founder of Virgin Group as the source text.In this translation practice,I mainly encountered two difficulties: firstly,how to retain vivid characters in the book in the target text;secondly,how to make sure the target text readable and as interesting as the source text.In order to elaborate the difficulties mentioned above,and conclude some general translation skills which can be applied to biographic translation,I wrote down this translation report,hoping to provide references to other translators who are going to translate biography in the future.The translation practice is under the guidance of Eugine Nida's‘back-transformation' translation theory.With the help of this theory,I can have a better understanding of the source text.When I restored people's characters in the target text,I mainly adopted the following techniques:(1)judge the emotional colours of the source text – commendatory or derogatory;(2)careful about lexical choices.In addition,biography translation is different from non-literal translation,such as military translation,technological translation and economic translation.It is characteristic of faithfulness,readability and interestingness.To make sure the target text equipped with these three characters,I(1)used as rich vocabularies as possible to avoid dullness of target text;(2)broke the original sentence structure,pursuing the fluency of target text;(3)when the source text involves scene description,I utilized atranslation skill called “picture construction”--first and the foremost,I contact to my own daily experience,then form a picture in mind,and eventually organize my own language on paper.In order to translate well,translators should pay attention to the characteristics of the source text.At the same time,it is crucial to retain people's characters in the target text.It directly affects the quality of the target text.Therefore,during translation process,translators should ensure the quality of the target text from the aspects mentioned above.