Often, this error means your program is too large, and often it's too large because it contains one or more very large data objects. For example,
char large_array[1ul << 31];
int other_global;
int main(void) { return other_global; }
will produce a "relocation truncated to fit" error on x86-64/Linux, if compiled in the default mode and without optimization. (If you turn on optimization, it could, at least theoretically, figure out that large_array is unused and/or that other_global is never written, and thus generate code that doesn't trigger the problem.)
What's going on is that, by default, GCC uses its "small code model" on this architecture, in which all of the program's code and statically allocated data must fit into the lowest 2GB of the address space. (The precise upper limit is something like 2GB - 2MB, because the very lowest 2MB of any program's address space is permanently unusable. If you are compiling a shared library or position-independent executable, all of the code and data must still fit into two gigabytes, but they're not nailed to the bottom of the address space anymore.) large_array consumes all of that space by itself, so other_global is assigned an address above the limit, and the code generated for main cannot reach it. You get a cryptic error from the linker, rather than a helpful "large_array is too large" error from the compiler, because in more complex cases the compiler can't know that other_global will be out of reach, so it doesn't even try for the simple cases.
Most of the time, the correct response to getting this error is to refactor your program so that it doesn't need gigantic static arrays and/or gigabytes of machine code. However, if you really have to have them for some reason, you can use the "medium" or "large" code models to lift the limits, at the price of somewhat less efficient code generation. These code models are x86-64-specific; something similar exists for most other architectures, but the exact set of "models" and the associated limits will vary. (On a 32-bit architecture, for instance, you might have a "small" model in which the total amount of code and data was limited to something like 224 bytes.)