A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of Two Papers On Depression From Nature

Nowadays,depression has become a significant disease that endangers human health.Thus,understanding depressive disorder has become increasingly important.In this report,the translator uses two papers from the sub-journals of Nature as the source text,namely “Revisiting the theoretical and methodological foundations of depression measurement” and “Role of polygenic and environmental factors in the co-occurrence of depression and psychosis symptoms: a network analysis,” and provides corresponding translations for them so as to promote the target readers’ further understanding of depression in China.In this report,the translator first introduces the source text and analyzes the language features and the target readers,and then he describes the translation process,including the preparation before the translation,and the steps taken during the translation.After that,he presents the revision process.And lastly,based on the skopos theory,he discusses the difficulties encountered during the translation and provides corresponding countermeasures in terms of the three levels of words,syntax,and text.At the lexical level,the translator adds footnotes to provide the necessary information for the target readers and chooses the most suitable meaning of the polysemous expressions so as to lessen the target readers’ load of understanding brought about by cultural differences.At the syntactic level,the translator deals with the difficulties in translating passive voice,negative construction and long complex sentences by shifting the voice and negation as well as by splitting the long and complex sentences so as to make the target text conform to the expression habits of the target readers.At the textual level,the translator achieves grammatical cohesion in translation by using substitution and ellipsis,and lexical cohesion by using synonymy and repetition.The translator learns a lot from the translation practice and report writing.Firstly,in the process of understanding the source text,the translator gains a preliminary understanding of terminology related to depression measurement and biology,gets a general idea of the methods and rules in depression measurement,and becomes familiar with the scientific approach to conducting psychological research.Secondly,in the translation process,he realizes that it is of great importance to follow the skopos rule of translation in order to maintain the intra-textual and inner-textual coherence.And lastly,in the process of selection of translation strategies and methods,he comes to master the translation skills such as explicitation,adjustment of word order,shift of voices,and reproduction of cohesion.It is hoped that this translation will be able to shed some light on the study of depression and it will offer some help to those Chinese readers who are interested in learning about the current situation of psychological research abroad.