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Writing Project 2: Genre Translation

Chengcai Guan

University of California, Santa Barbara

Writing 2: Academic Writing

Instructor: Valentina Fahler

May 22, 2022

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I will use this article to show my process of translating an academic article into a

poster. The original article is "What it means to be Zen: Marked local and interareal

synchronization modulations during open-monitoring meditation." The present study

shows significant relationships between mindfulness and brain activity during

meditation indicated by measures of oscillatory power and graph theoretical measures.

Nowadays, there are many famous people like Steve Jobs and Ray Dalio who

recommend meditation as a way to maintain brain health. However, there are still many

people around me, especially my Chinese relatives, who think that meditation is just a

superstitious method of Buddhism, similar to ancient sacrifices. This article about Zen

meditation is written for neuroscientists and experts. These neuroscientists study the

relationship between meditation and the human brain, and the article shows that

meditation has positive effects on the human brain. Therefore, I wanted to translate this

article into a club poster for convincing university students to join the meditation club

and enjoy meditation together. When I started to translate, I met the difficulty of

analyzing the translation genre, poster. Also, since I didn’t study Biology, I encountered

many difficulties when reading the article, such as understanding the use of jargon and

experimental models in the study. What's more, when I transformed it into a poster, I

also faced the problems of organizing the information and designing the poster.

Therefore, transforming the jargon and experimental models, which show the

relationship between mediation and neuroscience, from the original article into the

poster to fit the features of the poster and attract more university students to join the

club is crucial for my project. The process of overcoming these difficulties is the

process of my growth.

The first difficulty I met before fitting the features of the poster was analyzing my

translation genre, poster. It was pretty easy to understand the components of a common
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poster. A common poster had a variety of icons, text in different fonts, different colors,

pictures, and contact information. Even though common features, conventions and

makers were helpful signals, they couldn’t define the genre. Therefore, these simple

features were not enough for me to analyze my translation genre, a club poster. As

Bickmore said, “We begin to classify a kind of writing as a genre when it recurs

frequently enough and seems to perform the same functions in recurring situations”

(Bickmore 2016A).Like a flier and a business card, a college club poster is a publicity

tool to attract college students to join the club in the club recruitment fair. When the

club recruited new members or organized a new event, a club poster would be generated.

Therefore, my poster should also appear in situations when my club needed new

members or organized new activities. “It's perhaps helpful, as you learn about particular

genres, to think about how the genre at hand might fit into larger genre sets and

systems—or even ecologies, and how genres shape the ways we interact, live, and work

with each other” (Bickmore 2016A). I also had to answer the question how my club

poster shaped the ways we interact, live, and work with each other? I wanted to show

the relationship between meditation and the human brain in my poster. Next, I wanted

more members to join the club and try meditation together. Relatively, the university

students wanted to see interesting posters in the club recruitment fair, and they wanted

to know about the club they were interested in through the poster. What’s more, they

didn’t want to spend lots of time on understanding the posters. Therefore, my poster

should be associated with science, easy to understand, attractive to inspire students,

concise to let students access the information quickly, and the purpose of attracting new

members

After analyzing the translation genre, I had the difficulty of reading original articles

because there were many jargons and experimental data. What’s more, I had to look for
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content that could make my poster associated with science, easy to understand,

attractive to inspire students, and concise to let students access the information quickly,

and the purpose of attracting new members from the academic article. As a writer who

wanted to achieve the information effect through the poster, I would do research to

obtain that information and would organize the information in such a way that a reader

could understand it (Bickmore 2016B). Therefore, I needed to search for important,

attractive, and interesting experimental results and principles in the original academic

paper. However, it wasn’t easy for me to understand the content of this academic article

and obtain the information I needed. According to Karen Rosenberg, once you had the

main argument, you could make wise decisions about which parts of the text you needed

to pore over and which you could blithely skim (Rosenberg 2011). Therefore, I skipped

the academic analysis that was difficult for non-professionals to understand and went

straight to the relationship between meditation and biological sciences. Finally, I

concluded three points on this purpose. One was that MAAS scores correlated with

high-frequency gamma and individual meditation practice experience in hours. The

second one was that structural changes occurred in the parts of your brain involved in

attention and awareness during mediation. The last one was the differences between

Open Monitoring Meditation and Focused Attention Meditation.

At last, I needed to transform the three points I concluded from the original article

into the poster, and as Bickmore said, I have to organize the information in such a way

that a reader can understand it (Bickmore 2016B). This was another difficulty, because

university students had different educational experiences and they also came from

different majors. How did I keep the poster’s theme, meditation’s good effects on brain

health, and still keep the students interested in the club? I solved this problem through

images selection, color matching, jargon translations and texts of the posters.
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Image selection was a crucial part of making a poster because graphs were a very

common convention of posters. I chose a picture of a meditating person merging with

a tree and a picture of the human brain. These two pictures, as main parts of the poster,

occupied both sides of the poster. They divided the poster into two parts. One is about

meditation and the other one is about science. Thus, I realized my purpose of

highlighting the theme, meditation’s good effects on brain health. “Every day, our five

senses taken in an overwhelming amount of information, yet we quickly separate out

what we care about from the chaos and direct out attention toward it” (McCloud 2006).

As the biggest part of the poster, the picture should have the theme of meditation to

attract those who are interested in meditation, and it should also have the theme of

science to prove the benefits of meditation scientifically.

Since one of my main pictures was of a tree, I chose a color close to the color of

the earth and its gradient to match the picture. These colors would make the overall

poster softer. In doing so, it could be shown that meditation would bring peace and

freedom from anxiety. After solving the problems of choosing pictures and colors, I

experienced many difficulties with jargon translation. MAAS scores, as the jargon,

should be explained in the poster with a short text. According to the introduction in the

academic article, I concluded the definition of MAAS scores and transformed it with a

small font. The definition of MAAS and the detailed experimental results from the

article were put at the bottom of the poster, because they are supplemental information.

For icon selection, I used four icons. Two icons correspond to two kinds of meditation

methods, Open Monitoring Meditation and Focused Attention Meditation, I

summarized in my original academic paper. The third icon of the human brain showed

the changes in the human brain during meditation. The last mailbox icon was to

introduce the contact information of the club

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Converting academic papers full of jargon and experimental models into concise

posters was a challenge. After I analyzed the translation genre, a club poster, I extracted

the points in the original paper that the poster audience could accept and were interested

in. I presented the relationship between meditation and the brain with pictures and the

choice of icons. In color matching, I combined meditation with nature to create a soft

and peaceful atmosphere to appeal to students who want to get rid of anxiety.

Translation:
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Works Cited

Bickmore, L. (2016, August 1). Genre in the wild: Understanding genre within
rhetorical (eco)systems. Go to the cover page of Open English @ SLCC.
Retrieved May 22, 2022, from
https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-
understanding-genre-within-rhetorical-ecosystems/#genredefinition
Bickmore, L. (2016, August 1). The information effect: The facts, the figures, the so
what? Go to the cover page of Open English @ SLCC. Retrieved May 22, 2022,
from https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/the-information-effect-
the-facts-the-figures-the-so-what/
McCloud, S. (2006, September 5). McCloud chapter writing with pictures extended
version (1). McCloud, Making Comics 8-57. Retrieved May 22, 2022, from
https://www.labster8.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/McCloud-Making-
Comics-Ch1.pdf
Rosenberg, K. (2011). Reading games: Strategies for reading scholarly sources.
Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources. Retrieved May 23,
2022, from https://wac.colostate.edu/books/writingspaces2/rosenberg--reading-
games.pdf