A Report On The E-C Translation Of Beyond Words:Illness And The Limits Of Expression (Excerpts)

With the outbreak of COVID-19,harm and pain by illness is unveiled to the public.This also makes people pay more attention to the relationship between medicine and human as well as ethics dilemma between them.Narrative medicine,put forward by Dr.Rita Charon of Columbia University in the United States,integrates the professionalism and universality of medicine.It focuses on listening to patients’ stories,analyzing the relationship between medicine and humanities,defining the boundaries of medical ethics,and improving the increasingly tense doctor-patient relationship.At the same time,it can be used as a theory to guide medical practice and serve the treatment and rehabilitation of patients.This translation report is based on English to Chinese translation of the second and third chapters of Beyond Words: Illness and the Limits of Expression written by Kathlyn Conway.These two chapters describe the great impact of different diseases on patients and their lives,and present the complex psychological state of different patients as well as their physical and mental injuries caused by disease.The book is a popular scientific text,featuring with medical descriptions and literary expressions.Therefore,the translation is required to both accurately convey information of the source text and to embody its literariness.The report introduces the content and language expression characteristics of the original text,discusses the translation process,clarifies the theoretical framework,and analyzes some typical translation cases.Guided by Gideon Toury’s translational norms theory and combined with specific cases,the translator mainly adopts literal translation,liberal translation and conversion to solve book titles and abstract nouns.Such translation methods as inversion and division are employed to deal with the syntactic differences between these two languages.Through amplification and omission,better cohesion and coherence between paragraphs is achieved.The translator summarizes the gains and limitations from this translation practice.It is expected the report will provide some practical guidance for the translation of narrative medicine texts and promote the development of narrative medicine in a way.