A Report On The Translation Of The Psychology Of Repression And Polarization

This report is based on the English-to-Chinese translation practice of an academic paper The Psychology of Repression and Polarization,written by Elizabeth R.Nugent.The selected paper was published by Cambridge University Press on World Politics in April 2020.In this article,the author focuses on the issue of democratic politics in the Middle East,introducing a plausible process.In this process,the author has drawn central insights from the field of social psychology to conclude that the repression under different authoritarian regimes may affect their processes of polarization.This paper plays a positive role in helping scholars understand how political polarization occurs under repressive conditions from the perspective of psychology.This has important implications for academic study in the fields of political science and psychology.The source text contains many proper nouns(including,psychological,political science,laboratory,religious terms,and names of important people),long and complex sentences,and passive voice sentences.This translation project is guided by the theory of “Function plus Loyalty”,proposed by Christiane Nord,a German functionalist,based on a criticism of functionalism(especially Skopos theory).According to Nord’s text function type,the source text is an informative text with referential and informative functions: it transmits objective information related to psychological and political science.In the hopes of clarifying the translation goal,restoring the referential and informative functions of the source text in the translation,as well as taking into account the effective transmission of information from the perspective of the target readers—the translator analyzed the author’s writing purpose,the initiator’s requirements for the translation,as well as the language and cultural habits of the target readers.And this report uses the translation strategies of annotating,reconstructing sentence structures and splitting long sentences,etc.,to realize the referential and informative functions and embody loyalty at the level of words,sentences,and texts.This translation report is divided into five parts: an introduction to the translation task,an analysis of the source text,an introduction to Nord’s Function plus Loyalty Theory and its application to this project,and case analysis guided by the theory at the lexical,syntactic,and textual levels,with corresponding cases demonstrating how to apply translation theory to solve problems;the last part is a conclusion,which summarizes major findings and limitations in this translation.