Your Brain Is Always Listening(Excerpt) An English-Chinese Translation Report

In an era of rapid information development,people’s brains are susceptible to suboptimal thinking patterns,which can eventually lead to mental illness,thus the public are increasingly eager for psychological knowledge.However,the development of psychology in China lags behind that of European countries,and there is a shortfall of psychological works with international influence.In view of this,this report selects the new book Your Brain Is Always Listening,published in 2021 by the famous American psychologist and “father of brain health”,as the translation practice material to help people understand how to flawlessly grasp and manage our thinking and thoughts,so as to keep the brain healthy.The book is packed with real-life examples from different contexts and is highly practical.Guided by Halliday’s context theory and Hu Zhuanglin’s contextual classification,this report studies the relationship between context and translation by analyzing the of the original text.Through a number of cases,the report explores how context affects translation at lexical,syntactic and textual levels respectively,addresses chiefly the important and difficult points in this translation project,and finally proposes solutions to them.At the lexical level,giving due consideration to the linguistic context and the situational context,the translator determines the meanings of the technical terms and specific verbs in the source text to eliminate ambiguity and ensure the accuracy of the translation;at the syntactic level,the translator analyzes the emotion and purpose of the speaker expressed in the direct speech according to the situational and cultural contexts,analyzes the sentence structure of the long and difficult sentences,and reorganizes the information so as to accurately and fluently convey the information of the original text and achieve more effective cross-cultural communication;at the textual level,with the help of situational context and overall cultural context,the translator analyzes personal reference to determine precisely their referential meanings and remove the linguistic and cultural barriers for target readers,and with stronger textual awareness in the transition process,she attaches particular importance to lexical cohesion and the translation of some lexical terms to achieve better textual cohesion and coherence.This report will shed some light to the translation of psychological books.