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

The source text of this translation report is the first part of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload,a bestseller written by the famous American cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin. Based on taxonomy, neuroscience and cognitive psychology theory, etc, Daniel Levitin aims, with vivid cases, to interpret for the readers how human brain methodically process so much information,thus help people make sensible choices in the age of information overload.Being a popular science book, the source text can be categorized as informative text according to Perter Newmark’s text typology theory. Taking communicative translation theory as guiding principle, the translator adopts such techniques as changing of part of speech, semantic selection, voice conversion, and perspective shift, etc. on lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels to make translation conform as much as possible to target readers’ habitual way of understanding, and thus secures communicative translation.The translation report consists of 6 parts. Chapter One is a description of the translation project, composed of the introduction to the project, the introduction to the source text type, the significance of the project and the structure of the report. Chapter Two is the introduction to the preparation work for the translation, including source text confirmation, preparation for the translation tools, the selection of translation theory, a plan for the translation, the formulation of tables of terms and proper nouns, and the emergency planning. Chapter Three is the introduction to the process of translation, containing choosing the language style and organizing the translation. Chapter Four is about reviewing the translation. Chapter five analyzes typical cases that appeared in the translation process and explains how to solve translation problems in lexical level,sentence level and textual level by adopting different translation techniques based on Newmark’s text typology theory. Chapter six summarizes the translator’s gains and experience during this translation process, and points out the aspects that need to be improved.