A Report On Chinese Translation Of Motivation And Personality(Excerpts)

Motivation and Personality is one of the masterpieces of Abraham H.Maslow,a well-known American psychologist.It was first published in 1954 by Harper&Row Publishers.This book summarizes the early theories of Maslow and helps him establish his position in psychology.The translation of this book was commissioned by Chongqing Yunbin Translation Co.,Ltd.to the supervisor of the authoress.Consisting of six chapters,the translation project was completed by the authoress in cooperation with four team members.This report is based on the translation of Chapter 11 "Self-Actualizing People:A Study of Psychological Health" and Chapter 12 "Love in Self-Actualizing People",with over 38,000 Chinese characters in total.The source text is a psychological treatise with plain language,but the wording is abstract and a large number of pronouns and coordinate phrases are used,which makes it difficult to understand and translate.The target text should be accurate and expressive in accordance with the quality requirements proposed by the company.This report mainly analyzes the problems encountered by the authoress in translation and their solutions from the lexical and syntactic levels.At the lexical level,pronouns and abstract words are translated according to the specific context,using substitution,addition and word class conversion respectively.At the syntactic level,in order to make the sentence pattern more consistent with the Chinese usage and increase the readability,combination,division and adjustment of word order are employed.Through this attempt,the authoress understood that appropriate translation methods should be combined to ensure the accuracy and fluency of the translation.It is hoped that this report might do some help to the translation of psychological texts.