A Report On The E-C Translation Practice Of Principles Of Neural Science(Chapter 2)

This paper is an E-C translation practice report.The material comes from Principles of Neural Science edited by Eric R.Kandel.This masterpiece was published by China Machine Press in 2013.The author explains the nervous system and cognitive functions,deepening people’s understanding of the brain,consciousness and behavior.The translator selected Chapter Two Nerve Cells,Neural Circuitry,and Behavior as this translation task.This chapter provides a detailed introduction to two types of cells in the nervous system,including their names,characteristics and operating modes.It covers a large number of terminologies,with rigorous content,objective description and formal language.Typically,the source text belongs to the informative one.During the translation stage,shifts of parts of speech,shifts of grammatical functions and shifts of syntactical structures are major problems in this translation practice.In terms of complicated parts of speech,the translator adopted shifts of parts of speech,including shifts from adjectives to verbs,nouns to verbs and adverbs to nouns.On grammatical functions,the translator made translation shifts on tenses and plurals.For some special syntactical patterns,the translator adjusted the structures,such as changing passive voices to active voices,impersonal subjects to personal subjects,negative forms to affirmative expressions,complex clauses to short sentences.Through this translation practice,the translator’s background knowledge in the field of neural science has been strengthened.Also,the translator’s scientific-technical translation ability has been improved.From words to sentences,the translator realized the importance of translation shifts as well.Finally,it is also hoped that this report can provide a reference for future translation in the field of neural science.