Asian Journal of Current Research

In autobiography, identity is not a static label but the result of continuous construction within a specific family, cultural and social environment. In this process, translation, as an act of re-narration, inevitably affects the identity construction presented in the original work. This study takes Tara Westover’s autobiography Educated and its Chinese translation as its object of study and explores the narrative mechanisms of identity construction and their reconstruction through translation. Drawing on narratological theory, the study focuses on analysing how the author constructs her personal, cultural and social identities through narrative techniques. Methodologically, this study adopts qualitative comparative textual analysis, examining selected passages from the English original and its Chinese translation to identify narrative and translation strategies and their effects on identity construction. At the same time, the study further examines how the strategies adopted by the translator intervene in and reconstruct the expression of identity in the original work. The findings indicate that the protagonist’s identity construction in the original work evolves dynamically, and this process is mainly realised through perspective shifts and metaphor. Different translation strategies play distinct roles in reconstructing identity. Literal translation helps preserve linguistic characteristics in the original text; free translation enhances the emotional expression of metaphors; adaptation adjusts religious expressions in the original text; transcreation reconstructs cultural images; addition supplements implicit identity information; and condensation integrates the expression of the original text. Through comparative analysis of the Chinese and English texts, this study seeks to provide a theoretical reference for identity construction in autobiographical text translation.