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Reflection:

For my writing 2 work project 2. I translated an economics article (report) examining the

impact of risk and time on loss aversion as well as utility into a new genre. After reading many

different articles, I chose a children's science book as the new genre. Children's science book

would best integrate with the original academic reading since it is informative and

interesting. I encountered different degrees of difficulty in the translating process of this

article because it is not easy to translate deep and difficult concepts into easy-to-understand

information. However, I think this top-down translation process is meaningful since I believe

expanding the target audiences of knowledge to young people can help and educate people.

The article “Is There One Unifying Concept of Utility? An Experimental Comparison of Utility

Under Risk and Utility Over Time” analyzed the loss aversion’s changing intensity under two

different variables-the degree of risk and the interval of time by using utility as the factor to

measure the changing intensity. The report gathered a wide range of data and experiments and

finally present the conclusion that loss aversion increases when risk increases or time increases.

As an article that incorporates a variety of economic theories and data, the original target

audiences for this report are college students majoring in economics and above. My translation,

which is a story-based novel, changes the target audience from the previous scope to teenagers

and children.

The main goal of this translation is to convey new information to new audiences in a

helpful and relaxing way. I want to help everyone weigh the pros and cons of life rationally

since life has never taught people economic concepts to help people make rational decisions,
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but life has always required people to make a variety of decisions. Because everyone hates to

lose, it's always easy to get tangled up in weighing the benefits. When I was a kid, I always

struggled with whether to do my homework or play first, and I saw my parents struggle with

whether to invest or save money. People often end up making inappropriate decisions in a

panic because they can't think rationally, and then regret their decisions later. By translating

the mechanism of measuring losses upon risk and time in economics into a simple children's

book, more people can become the target audience, thus helping them learn how to better

analyze their feelings and then face each choice.

One of the primary tasks I encountered in this genre translation project was choosing

the genre. I was initially inspired by Bickmore's article The Information Effect in the conception

of WP2, the rich data and tables in Bickmore's article made me realize that I could choose a

more concise way to convey ideas, so I initially chose to use a self-assessment form to interact

with my audience and hope that those forms can help them understand abstruse information.

Although this idea helped me to summarize the content of the academic and apply it to the final

translation process, the genre did not allow me to explain the concepts better in the first

translation process at that time, instead I could only show my readers how the concepts worked

in reality; after all, the self-assessment table could not hold too much knowledge and

information. I realized that I need to find a better genre that can convey ideas in a better way.

I found that the story-based novel can be the answer to my genre-choosing problem. In

another article by Bickmore- Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical

(Eco)system, Bickmore indicated that people begin to classify a kind of writing as a genre when
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it seems to perform the same functions in recurring situations. The “recurring situations” made

me think of an image of children gathered to read. I suddenly realized that story-based reading

is one of the first mediums of learning knowledge we are exposed to when we are still children,

and it is a perfect setting.

To effectively integrate information from primary sources into the story-based reading, I

need the language to be humorous but informative since I want to convey profound knowledge

in a relaxing way.. McCloud's Writing With Pictures has helped me to integrate two pieces of

information and satisfied these opposed properties. In this comic strip, Writing With Pictures,

I realized that the combination of different genres is the most important factor that makes the

text interesting and easy to be accepted by younger children. One of the things that struck me

about McCloud’s comic strip was that McCloud used five small drawings to inform the

audience how to describe a scene effectively. I’m not a patient reader, so it is not easy for me

to remember the content of the information well, but with the interesting comics, the concepts

seemed to become more distinctive. This also made me realize that the combination of

academic and novel may be the key to making young people learn profound knowledge in a

relaxing way.

I narrowed down my option and chose a science-based storybook as my final genre. I

was inspired again by Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)system.

Bickmore indicated in the article that a genre is an act of language that behaves in typical or

characteristic ways, which we can observe in repeated but different situations. When it comes

to genres where the same function is addressed and appears repeatedly in different scenarios, I
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believe that science-based storybooks are a common example. I have read a lot of children's

science books that appear in different contexts, some are general knowledge, some tell

historical stories - but different science books have the same function, which is to help children

learn new knowledge that might be boring. This idea reminds me of a book called Puppy Money.

Puppy Money is about a girl Gia rescued an injured white Labrador retriever named Money,

however, Money is a real financial genius. Gia and Money became friends and earn a lot of

secrets and truths about wealth, as well as investment, and financial management approach

from Money. This example made me realize that I could also construct such a guiding virtual

character to guide teenagers and children to learn.

The main goal of this project is to effectively transform an academic economic article

into a new genre that expands the target audience. In the new genre, I conveyed the focus of

the original academic article that loss aversion rises when risk and time rise to new audiences.

As a wider range of audiences is being educated, this new genre can help more people make

rational decisions based on the new information they learned. Translating an intricate

academic text into another genre is not an easy process, but it conveys to me another important

layer of t writing -that is to present different ideas in different forms to different groups. In

my translation project, this layer of meaning of writing was fully presented as well. By

translating abstract concepts of the economy into a novel for children, I conveyed new

information to more people and help them know how to effectively analyze each decision based

on loss aversion.
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Work Cited

Bickmore, L.2022. GENRE in the WILD: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical

(Eco)systems.OnlineSource:Openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com.

https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-

genre-within-rhetorical-ecosystems/. Accessed 15 May 2022.

Bickmore, L.2022. GENRE in the WILD: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical

(Eco)systems. Online source: Openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com.

https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understaning-g

enre-within-rhetorical-ecosystems/. Accessed 15 May 2022.

Schaefer, Bodo. 2015. Puppy Money. Sichuan Children’s Publishing House. Accessed 18 May

2022.

McCloud,Scott.2009.Writing with picturesOnline Sources from

https://www.scottmccloud.com/2009/06/29/writing-with-pictures/. Accessed 18 May 19,

2022.