A Report On The Translation Of Educated:A Memoir(Excerpts)

The source text of this translation report is from Chapter 15 and 16,and Chapter 36 to 38 of Tara Westover's autobiography Educated: A Memoir(2018).It describes a woman who never received any formal education until the age of seventeen because her family is extremely religious,and with painstaking efforts who finally got self-developed and graduated from Cambridge with a Doctor degree.It is also a process of her personal struggle to stand up to and get rid of her original family.Tara Westover,the author of the book,is an American memoirist,essayist and historian,and was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2019.It is hoped that this translation sets out an attempt as the source text does to reveal the ontological meaning of education that is a self-finding,world-exploring and fatechanging process,and by reflecting upon education per se,to encourage people to strive for a more meaningful life.As an autobiography,the book Educated: A Memoir is characterized by the combination of dialogues and thought presentations.It contains a large number of scenes,vivid characterization,and rich religiously-connoted words and expressions.Therefore,in order to vividly reproduce the story and present the distinctive characters and religious culture,the translator is supposed to grasp the meaning between the lines for a precise representation of the story world that is intertwined with the subjective world of the narrator.Compared with traditional translation theories,pragmatic treatment towards translation(He Ziran,1998)equates the practice to the process of intercultural bilingual communication by focusing not only on semantic equivalence,but also on pragmatic equivalence which emphasizes the use of language in context.Based on specific aspects of pragma-linguistic equivalence and sociopragmatic equivalence,the report describes the choice of word meaning and punctuation and the translation of complex clauses and passive sentences that are highly frequent in the source text during the translation.Taking language differences and context into consideration,the translator chooses appropriate word meaning,sentence pattern and punctuation to realize the pragma-linguistic equivalence between the target text and the original text.As for culturallyconnoted words and slangs,the translation strategy of domestication or foreignization adding annotations is used to achieve the socio-pragmatic equivalence between the target text and the source text.The report consists of five chapters.Chapter One is the task description introducing the background and significance,the source text,and the objectives of the translation project,as well as the structure of the thesis;Chapter Two is devoted to process description,involving pretranslation,the translation process,and post-translation;Chapter Three introduces the theoretical basis for the translation practice;Chapter Four offers a detailed case study;Chapter Five is the summary of the translation experience and problems to be solved in this translation practice.