A Translation Project Report On Forgetting:the Benefits Of Not Remembering(Chapter 1 And 2)

The source language text of this report is excerpted from Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering(Chapter 1 and 2)by Scott A.Small.The book introduces how memory and forgetting work and several memory-related disorders,such as Alzheimer’s disease and autism,and thus analyses the various benefits of forgetting.The author considers that forgetting is beneficial to people’s cognitive ability,creativity,mental health,and so on.This book,characterized by strong professionalism,many medical terms,and complex sentence structure,is a popular medical science text which mainly involves medicine,neurology,psychology,and other related fields.Therefore,the main difficulty in translation is how to accurately convey the information of the source text,so as to make the target text understandable and conform to Chinese readers’ reading habits.Guided by the communicative translation theory,this report analyses the key and difficult points encountered in translation from three aspects: word,sentence,and discourse,and explores appropriate translation methods and strategies.The following conclusions are drawn: Firstly,for amphibious words,the translator should carefully check and figure out their implied medical meanings.For ordinary words,the translator should flexibly adopt translation methods such as the extension of lexical meaning.Secondly,the translator should split,adjust and reorganize sentences according to their components and logical relations,and comprehensively use translation methods such as sequential translation,inverse translation and restructuring to accurately convey the content of the source text.Thirdly,the translator should pay attention to the coherence and cohesion at the textual level.This research helps readers to know the overview of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and autism and contributes to the spreading of new ideas of neuropsychology such as memory and forgetting in China.Besides,some translation strategies proposed in this report are of some reference significance for the translation of such popular medical science texts.