A Report On E-C Translation Of Parentheses In Medicine’s Moving Pictures:Medicine,Health And Bodies In American Film And Television(Excerpt)

The translation material of this report is chosen from an edited book Medicine’s Moving Picture: Medicine,Health and Bodies in American Film and Television.It collects several essays on the relationship between the society and films and TV series about medicine.The translator chooses two representative essays from the book to translate.The selected translation material is written by plain,explicit language and contains medical and film terminology as well as different kinds of parentheses,which challenge the translation.According to Katharina Reiss’ s text type theory,the selected translation material is informative text.This report will explore the translation methods of parentheses in this translation material based on text type theory.According to Reiss’ s guidance on the translation of informative text,the target text should firstly convey information of original text accurately.Because of the different functions of parentheses in conveying text information,proper translation methods should be selected according to their functions.Parentheses in this translation material are classified into five categories according to their functions on the basis of Ding Wangdao’s categorization,that is,parentheses for commenting,parentheses for highlighting,parentheses for adding information,parentheses for coherence and parentheses for simplifying.Secondly,during the process of translation,the readability of the target text should be guaranteed.Owing to the differences between the usage of parentheses in Chinese and English,parentheses in the original text are often changed into other forms according to Chinese grammar.Under the requirement these two principles,parentheses for commenting in this translation material can be rendered into prepositional attributives or adverbials.Parentheses for highlighting are moved to the head of sentences or clauses.Parentheses for adding information are inserted by brackets or dashes.These punctuation marks used in parentheses in this material can be deleted for they are not so often used in Chinese.As for parentheses for coherence,sequence adjustment is a translation method used to make the translation conform to the expression habits of Chinese.Pronouns are employed to make the translation as simple as possible concerning parentheses for simplifying.For parentheses with the same function,translation methods may be different,but the way to deal with their translation is almost the same.The author hopes that the translation and report of this selected material can offer a reference for the study and translation of medical films and TV series.