A Report On The Translation Of MAYO CLINIC ON HEALTHY AGING (Chapter Twelve,Chapter Thirteen)

Due to the aging of population, more and more people focus on how to make the old live a comfortable life. China is a country that speaks highly of filial piety, which promotes residents’ attention on this issue. And based on the research by Mayo Clinic, this book was written by the experts devoting to the health of elders. The whole book was made up of about 90,000 words, making analysis on composite factors such as comfort, nutrition, preventive nursing, Medicare as well as social relations of the old. This report mainly analyzes Chapter 12 and Chapter 13. These parts mainly focus on the specific Medicare in America, assistive devices for living smarter and future health planning issues.With the translation of other chapters by my classmates, we finished the translation of 90,000 words. When translating, the translator was facing several conflicts: the translation of Medicare-related terms and definitions, the dealing with difficult long sentences and how to make it easy and fluent for the old to understand. The book is kind of informative, whose main purpose is to express information and the writing core is the reality and the readers. So the Skopos theory, founded by the famous Germen translation professors Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiss, guided my translation process. According to Skopostheory, the prime principle determining any translation process is the purpose of overall translational action. When translating, firstly take the purpose and the readers’ condition into consideration, and then deal with the difficulties. All of your translation should aim at realizing the purpose and value of the original book. The Skopos theory which is the basic theory of translation functionalist contains three basic principles: Skopos rule, intra-coherence rule and inter-coherence or fidelity rule. My translation of the last three chapters of the book was fully focused on the skopos readers. But when facing some difficulty long sentences, I usually give up the inter-coherence rule to make the translation fluent. As for some professional terms, I adapt the inter-coherence rule because some new terms should be imported. Guided by this principle, and according to the text, I specifically used the method of switching the meaning or the nature of the word, shifting the active voice to positive voice, adjusting the order, adding some words and so on, I finally improved my translation and completed the thesis task.