A Report On The Translation Of Medical Materials During COVID-19 Pandemic

Ever since the outbreaks of Covid-19,the demand for medical translators is increasingly significant.The author participated in translating a series of materials relating to medicine during the period spanning from the end of 2019 to the end of 2021.This report aims to present the thinking process of the author,compare the original and revised translation,and summarize and share the difficulties and strategies encountered in the process.Following the "Comprehension,Expression and Adaptation"（CEA）framework,the author concluded some of the factors that affected her comprehension,expression and adaptation when translating,also provided explanations for how those factors were at play,the coping strategies and possible revisions.Specifically speaking,factors influencing comprehension include misunderstanding of the text,flawed source texts,quasi-medical terms,specialized terms and background knowledge;the Expression section covers how the usage of professional style,the conciseness in video subtitles,the availability of the equivalent terms from parallel texts,and the complexity of the sentences raised the bar for translation;and the Adaptation section discusses the employment of compression and simplification strategies used in order to handle limited space and increase idiomaticity.Having translated multifarious documents and revisited the results made the author realize that the language competency of the translators does not guarantee a high quality translation.The English way of thinking,the accumulation of medical knowledge,the application of critical thinking,the ability to analyse and verify the translation and other technical capacities are all equally significant elements that can affect the quality of medical translation.