A Report On The Translation Of Nature And Nurture In Personality And Psychopathology:A Guide For Clinicians (Excerpt)

This translation report is based on E-C translation of the Introduction and chapter one of the book Nature and Nurture in Personality and Psychopathology: A Guide for Clinicians written by Joel Paris,a Professor of Psychiatry at Mc Gill University.The selected text mainly introduces the dimensions of psychopathology and the positive significance of the nature-nurture integrated model for the diagnosis of mental diseases.In light of Peter Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation theory,this report discusses difficulties and solutions of medical text translation.Since the source text is a medical text,due to its advanced and precise structure,there are a lot of complex sentences,which make it more difficult to understand the original text and translate into the target text.Under the guidance of Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation theory,the translator selects some representative cases in the source text,analyzes the difficulties encountered in the translation process from three levels---lexical,syntactical and textual,and adopts two translation strategies,that is,semantic translation and communicative translation,as well as translation techniques,such as amplification and conversion,so as to make the translation more conform to the expression habits of the target readers and convey the content of the original text accurately.Through the practice,a conclusion can be drawn that Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation theory is of great importance for translating medical texts.Under the guidance of these two theories,some difficulties of the translation practice have been solved,such as the translation of proper names of diseases,complicated and long sentences and passive voice so as to achieve textural coherence.