A Translation Report On The Organized Mind:Thinking Straight In The Age Of Information Overload (Excerpts)

This is a translation report based on the introduction and the first chapter of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.From the view of neuroscience and cognitive psychology,the author illustrated the working mechanism and principles of attention and memory of brain,and showed us how to organize our life and work efficiently so as to have a happy,efficient and satisfying life in the information surplus era.The translation is aimed to help Chinese readers to make their minds systematic,learn to think efficiently and become more creative in the information overload era.The translation project includes the introduction and the first chapter of the book,amounting to more than 18,000 words.The introduction had a general outline of the whole book,mainly covering information and its systematic organization.The first chapter discussed that too much information leads to too many decisions and the inside history of cognitive overload.The translation report mainly consists of the whole translating process,namely,source text analysis,stylistic analysis,clear translating goals and target readers,key and difficult points,case analysis and conclusion.In the process,the translator made a full use of his knowledge in Chinese and English languages and cultures and rich encyclopedic knowledge,drew lessons from some translating theories and skills,such as literal and free translation and skillfully adopted syntactic and semantic translation methods including addition,deletions and reorganization,and semantic extension,semantic explication,semantic variation.When writing this paper,the translator read a great number of relevant parallel texts,grasped connotation of professional terminologies of certain fields and paid attention to key and difficult points.After the first draft,the translator had modified it several times and finally finished the translation project successfully.The translator concludes that in the translation of popular science works he should firstly pay attention to its scientificity,then popularization,literariness,and interestingness,the translator also finds some limitations in the translation and accumulates some experiences for this kind of translation in the future.