A Translation Report On How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life Of The Brain(excerpts)

The source text of the translation,excerpted from How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain,is about 18,000 words.The author of the book intends to explore the secret of human brain,and comes to a conclusion that emotions are the cumulative results of people's learning since they are born,and that the brain predicts its cognitive results based on various scenarios.Simply put,emotions are not triggered but are constructed.The book,based on the writer's personal experience,is not pedantic at all,and instead,it is quite interesting and readable.By translating this work,the translator hopes to provide Chinese readers another perspective into their emotions,so as to help them face their life and work with a healthy attitude.In pre-translation preparation,the translator makes a brief introduction to the author,the content and stylistic features of the source text in a detailed text analysis,which is helpful for the translator to have a better understanding of the source text.According to the stylistic features and creation purpose of the source text,the translator chooses the functional equivalence of Eugene Nida as the guiding theory for the translation.To keep the standardization of the proper nouns and terms,the translator puts them into a table as the standard for the whole translation.Then,the translator analyses the difficulties,and introduces the main tools and resources used in the translating.With some detailed case analyses,the translator introduces the application of some translation skills and methods in the lexical and syntactic levels,such as conversion,liberal translation,sentence division,reinventing the sentence structure etc.Through the translation,the translator finds out how useful and important the pre-translation preparation is for the translator to better understand the source text,to identify the difficult points so as to adopt the appropriate translation methods.Besides,case analysis helps the translator have a better handling of the translation theory,skills and methods by applying the translation theory into practice.Therefore,the translator concludes the gains and lessons in the translation,and proposes some suggestions for the future translation in the last chapter.The translator hopes that this translation report is valuable for the translation of the texts with similar features.