Report On Graduation Practice—Translation Of Essays Selected From Harvard Business Review

Both essays I translated are derived from Harvard Business Review, an affiliate of Harvard Business School. Established in1922, Harvard Business Review (HBR for short) focuses on advanced management concepts and cutting-edge business knowledge. Selected from HBR, the two essays are "Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform" written by Edward M. Hallowell, published in January2005, and "Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life" written by Stewart D. Friedman, published in April2008. The first essay introduces to readers "a very real but unrecognized neurologic phenomenon"(Edward M. Hallowell,2005), attention deficit trait, or ADT which is now pervasive among various companies. The essay also gives a brief but clear explanation on how the neurologic condition develops from an etiologic perspective and then separately supplies several suggested and constructive measures for coping with ADT. Concentrating on "improving people’s performance in multiple domains of their lives"(Stewart D. Friedman,2008:112), win-win experiments are designed in "Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life" for participants to break the barriers amidst work and the rest of their lives and boost participants’ lives in an all-round way for them and their most important people in their lives."Edward M.’Ned’Hallowell, MD, is psychiatrist and the founder of the Hallowell Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health in Sudbury, Massachusetts"(Edward M. Hallowell,2005). He has written12books, including Delivered from Distraction published in2005, and attention deficit disorder or ADD is introduced in the book. Hallowell is an authority in the field of studying ADD, and through unremitting research he has found out a new neurologic phenomenon and initially named it ADT with symptoms very similar to that of ADD."Stewart D. Friedman is the Practice Professor (2008) of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in Philadelphia. He is the founding director of Wharton’s Leadership program and of its Work/Life Integration Project. He is the author of numerous books and articles on leadership development, work/life integration, and the dynamics of change"(Stewart D. Friedman,2008:113). The translations discuss the problems workers encountered in work. The problem in the first essay is that smart people sometimes underperform, and the other problem in the second essay is that workers cannot balance work with the rest of their lives. Issues discussed in the two essays, however are very common to average Chinese workers and they are still remaining unsolved. Bewilderment caused by development has influenced western civilizations for a certain period of time, but for China, it is still a new out-comer. Therefore, west society has richer experience in dealing with such problems and importing their achievements into China can be constructive. For those who in China are stranded by problems listed in the two essays, the two translations could probably do them a big favor, directing them to live richer and work smarter. English is a hypotactic language of which grammar and logic are explicitly displayed in sentences, but sentences in Chinese are structured by parataxis, and the grammar and logic in Chinese are implicit. In a word, they differ. Thus, in English-Chinese translation, numerous problems have turned up. For example, how does the translator address the prepositions in English, because they are infrequently used in Chinese? How does the translator express the hidden information between the lines in source texts? How does the translator handle new words from the source language which have not been established in the target language? How does the translator deal with problems caused by cultural gaps, such as western food names? Though the source language and the target language have a set of opposite rules, the translation I made could be target-language-oriented in conveying information. To achieve this goal, multiple translation approaches have been adopted. Speech transformation is implemented to transform English prepositions into Chinese verbs, and addition is used for unveiling hidden information which will be incomplete in translations. A sentence without a subject could be used to comply with the Chinese convention, and referential translation of neologism would provide alternatives when translators render new words. Each approach generalized in the report is equally applicable to problems elsewhere.