A Translation Report Of The Me I Want To Be (Chapter One To Chapter Three)

This is a translation report on the first three chapters of The Me I Want To Be,a novel written by John Ortberg.The original author narrates his failures in life and career and reflects human weaknesses.And with the help of his family and Gospel,the original author establishes new life goals and even shares his pleasure with readers in the pursuit of the best self.The translation of the book is likely to guide people to understand themselves correctly and to deal with the social pressure in a proper way.Metaphor is the most prominent language characteristic in the source text.As a special cultural phenomenon,metaphor usually boasts unique thinking mode and cultural connotation.By means of metaphors,the original author illustrates human images and depicts psychological changes to highlight his writing purposes,that is,to persuade and encourage more people to achieve the best self through the original author?s own experiences.To effectively convey the information of metaphors,the author employs Skopos Theory to put the metaphors into more effective rendering,by adopting three ways to cope with: literal translation,replacement with a similar metaphor and free translation.Literal translation is conducive to delivering information while retaining the literal meaning of metaphors in the source text;replacement with a similar Chinese metaphor conforms to reading habits of target readers;free translation expresses the source information in a simple way.From the analysis of examples in the report,it is concluded that translators should figure out the original author?s intentions and the implicit meanings of metaphors,and consider their translation purposes to translate metaphors flexibly,which is of importance to realize cross-cultural communication.