A Report On The E-C Translation Of Understanding Bipolar Disorder (Excerpts) From Skopos Theory

Recent years have witnessed large surges in the number of people diagnosed with mental illness like depression,obsessive-compulsive disorder,social phobia and bipolar disorder due to a substantial increase of living and working pressure.Every year there are increasing media reports about suicide or violent crime committed by patients with mental illness.The issue of mental health is impending and should attract more public attention.Under such a background,Understanding Bipolar Disorder,an authoritative mental illness report released by the British Psychological Society Division of Clinical Psychology,is selectively translated to meet the needs of patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder in China,and to provide constructive reference and experience for the development of domestic mental health services.The translated parts,the core of this mental illness report,covers the causes and development course of mood swings,definition of bipolar disorder,relevant psychotherapies,types of applicable meditations,experience-sharing comments quoted from patients,etc.This source text,an "informative text" in general,is written in a formal and objective language style,featuring a lot of psychological and medical terms,polysemes,long sentences,passive sentences and clear logic relations.The experience-sharing quotes from patients,however,are quite casual,with normally colloquial diction and comparatively less complicated sentences."Skopos Theory"is put forward by Hans Vermmer,a representative from "German School" of functionalist translation theories.Regarding translation purpose and target readers as the primary concern in translation process,Skopos theory highlights that translation strategies and methods are determined by translation skopos,and that the target text should make sense in target culture,in conformity with target readers' reading expectations and habits.With Skopos theory as the guiding theory for the translation practice,the translator adopts different translation strategies and methods to solve practical problems emerging in the translation process,such as how to deal with technical terms,how to rearrange syntactic structures,how to achieve textual cohesion&coherence,and how to retain the original textual style.This translation report thus analyzes in details the translation of Understanding Bipolar Disorder from lexical,syntactic and textual level,and proposes translation methods as annotation,literal translation,omission,word class conversion,synchronizing,restructuring,splitting and repetition to render translation version clear,accurate and fluent so that the target readers is able to share the same reading experience with the source readers.Through this translation practice,the translator learns that thorough preparations,such as reading professional books,theoretical literature etc,is of crucial importance.Besides,translators are also supposed to make the best of modern translation tools and online resources,keep improving bilingual competence and employ a variety of translation strategies to produce high-quality translation version.