A Translation Report Of The Nocturnal Brain:Nightmares,Neuroscience,and The Secret World Of Sleep

With the acceleration of pace of life and the change of lifestyle,sleep problems have become a major factor affecting the physical and mental health of Chinese people.Sports and Sleep White Paper was released in March 2021 by China Sleep Research Society.The data shows that more than 300 million people in China have sleep disorders.Sleep problems not only affect people’s life,work and learning,but also cause many chronic diseases,such as hypertension and heart disease.However,many people have misconceptions of sleep and sleep disorders.Against this background,the author translates The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares,Neuroscience,and the Secret World of Sleep.The knowledge of brain and sleep in this book may enable readers to have a correct understanding of sleep and sleep disorders.And the treatments in the book can help patients treat their sleep disorders.Under the guidance of Newmark’s communicative and semantic translation approach,the author discusses translation strategies of popular science texts at lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.At lexical levels,terminologies and abstract nouns are involved.The exact meanings of some terms can be rendered through consulting dictionaries,while the meanings of other terms have to be reproduced through consulting technical literature and taking account of the context.The choice of word meanings and conversion of the part of speech are used in the translation of abstract nouns.At syntactic level,there are four types of sentence patterns discussed.The first one is the passive sentences.The author converts the passive sentences into active and passive sentences respectively.The next is the adverbial clauses.The author adopts the methods of keeping the original order and inversion.The third one is the attributive clauses.The author adopts four methods: converting the clauses into the prepositive attributes,the independent sentences,the compound sentences and the clauses with adverbial functions.The last sentence pattern is the long sentences.The author takes two methods: following the original order and reorganizing the original order.The author retains the structures and orders of some sentences,which is semantic translation.The author also adjusts the sentence structures and narrative manners to conform to the grammatical and syntactic rules of Chinese,so that the target language readers can understand the renderings more easily,which is communicative translation.At discourse level,under the guidance of the communicative and semantic approach,the author preserves the original style of the colloquial texts.Besides,the author employs cohesive devices including reference,conjunction and co-occurrence to improve fluency and readability of the target text.The cases and their analyses in this report demonstrate that the semantic translation and communicative translation approach can play a guiding role in popular science translation.Under the guidance of the approach,the author adopts a variety of translation strategies,which provide references for the translation and study of popular science texts.