A Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of Mental Health Lecture Notes (Excerpt) Guided By The Semantic And Communicative Translation Theory

As the social competition is going viral and living pace is becoming faster,invisible stress is exhausting us.Meanwhile,the often-neglected mental health issues are imposing harm to our health.Taking this opportunity,the present thesis introduces-from the Chinese-English translation of Mental Health Lecture Notes(Excerpt),how the physical body,energy,and spirit interact with each other in meditation for psychosomatic adjustment from the prospective of Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM).It helps us get familiar with our physical body,keep independent observation and thinking,and extend the connection with the world,thus achieving a comprehensive health.Guided by Peter Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation theory,the author has conducted the translation task.The source text is adapted from lectures about mental health,which is intended to have the readers learn and try the psychosomatic exercise-meditation and holistic observation.It is kind of vocative text.At lexical level,there are lots of traditional Chinese culturally loaded words like Traditional Chinese Medicine glossary,featured by profession and popularization,where the theory of semantic translation and communicative translation shall be combined so as to introduce the culturally loaded information to the English speakers as well as carrying forward the traditional Chinese culture.At syntactical and textual level,due to that Chinese language is of parataxis,and tends be dynamic,active and consisted of run-on sentences,while English language is of hypotaxis,and tends to he static,passive,it is better to make some transformation in the translation guided by the theory of communicative translation so as to conform to the norms of the English language.However,in actual translation,it is difficult to be guided by semantic translation or communicative translation alone,and usually the combined use of the two theories will help present the precise meanings of the source text without causing troubles for the understanding of the target language readers.The author hopes the task will provide guidance for translation of text of the same type in the future.