A Report On The Translation Of What To Do When Someone You Love Is Depressed (Excerpts)

What to Do When Someone You Love Is Depressed is chosen as the source text in this translation practice.The book introduces in detail the causes,manifestations and effects of depression,and also provides some professional advice and guidance for families and friends of patients with depression.As an informative text,this book requires the translator to give priority to the target readers’ understanding and acceptance of the text.According to the theory of text types,the main purpose of informative text is to convey information,and their translation must be concise,accurate,and easy to understand.Explicitation is applicable to the translation of informative text,so the translator carried out translation practice from the perspective of explicitation.The concept of explicitation,proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet,provides a new perspective for translation studies.Explicitation means that the translator infers the implicit information in the source language from the context or the relevant context and makes it explicit in the target language,so as to make the meaning and logic of the original text clearer.This translation report is based on the translation practice of the first part of the book,guided by the strategy of explicitation.It is combined with translation examples,focusing on the translation of its implicit information from the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.This translation report consists of four parts: introduction,process description,case analysis and conclusion.The first part briefly introduces the background of the task,the content and features of the source text.The second part describes the three steps of translation:pre-translation process,translation process and post-translation process.The third part mainly discusses the translation methods of informative text from the perspective of explicitation.At the lexical level,addition,annotation and paraphrase are used to realize explicitation;at the syntactic level,methods such as conversion of sentence patterns and splitting and reorganizing are used to realize explicitation;at the discourse level,methods such as specifying references and adding logical conjunctions are used to realize explicitation.The last part summarizes the translator’s findings and limitations in the process of translation.It is hoped that this translation practice report can provide some reference and enlightenment for the translation of the same type of text in the future.