A Translation Project Report On Out Of My Sky-If The Spring Can Stay (Excerpt)

Autobiographical novel,written from the perspective of the main character's personal experience and deeds,is created by the use of the novel's art of writing and expression skills.However,the linguistic features of autobiographical novels are mainly colloquial and life-oriented,so it is difficult to do the translation due to the great differences between Chinese and western cultures.The source text is selected from Out of My Sky-If the Spring can Stay(except),written by He Jiang,born after 1980 s from a poor rural family,who is the first Chinese ever to give a Harvard commencement address,and was named by Forbes magazine as one of the 30 young elites under 30 years old in the field of health care.The novel is about the author's experience to success,telling the story behind the author's growth in detail,which shows the readers the poor but happy rural life and the author's struggle for the pursuit of dreams.Through the analysis of the source text,the translator finds that the culture-loaded words and four-character words are in majority;long and complex sentences are overwhelming,which make translation more difficult.Therefore,the translator chooses skopos theory as the theoretical guidance to analyze the key and difficult points at the lexical and syntactical level.In order to realize the communicative function of the target text in the context of the target language,the translator adopts the foreignizing translation strategy when translating culture-loaded words.Literal translation and free translation are respectively adopted in the translation of the four-character words.In the translation of long and complex sentences,the translation skills of supplement,combination,inversion and conversion are applied.The translator hopes to accumulate some skills and experiences in novel translation through this translation practice,so as to provide some references for the translation of similar literary works in the future.