A Translation Project Report On Everybody's Autobiography(Chapter One)

This translation project material is selected from Everybody's Autobiography,which is an autobiographical text by Gertrude Stein,a famous American modernist writer.Regarded as a sequel of Stein's representative work The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas,Everybody's Autobiography is less humorous but more gloomy,complex and unintelligible,which makes this book ignored by the readers.This translation project aims to allow a wide range of readers to understand more deeply the life and writing of Gertrude Stein,her outstanding contribution to American literature in the 20~thh century,and even to the European modernism.The excerpt is from Chapter one What happened after The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas,which mainly describes some of the trivialities that have taken place after her completion of The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas,including the interaction between her and various writers and artists.Stein's writing style is featured with the use of repeated words and sentences,unconventional punctuation marks,and untraditional grammar.This unique writing style of hers has brought difficulties to the author's translation practice.In order to solve these difficulties,the translator adopts Vermeer's Skopos theory as a guide and employ the domesticated translation strategy with the aim to make the target readers clearly understand what Stein wants to express.During this translation practice,the translator finds that the translation text cannot maintain the total equivalence to the original text,so the translator gives up to achieve the complete equivalence between the source text and the target text,striving to standardize the target text in line with the reading habits of the target readers.