A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Verbal Nominalization In Legislative Texts

Frequent employment of verbal nominalization has been identified as animportant feature of legal English. And the frequency of verbal nominalization inEnglish is much higher than that in Chinese. Therefore, when verbal nominalization inlegal English is translated into Chinese, whether to retain the verbal nominalization isan indispensable issue to be considered. If it is retained, which form is appropriate toadopt? If not, which form should it be converted into? This thesis aims at giving adiscussion to such issues and hopes to present some enlightenment for legal Englishlearners or translators.This thesis attempts to probe from the perspective of contrastive linguistics intothe conversion of English verbal nominalization into Chinese in legislative texts. Thethesis first defines and classifies English and Chinese verbal nominalizationrespectively by literature review. Then it chooses WCT and WPPT as data andconducts statistical analysis of the data in English and in Chinese respectively inaccordance with the scholars’ definitions. Lastly, the thesis describes how the Englishverbal nominalizations in the data are converted into different types of Chinese verbalnominalizations or non-verbal nominalizations.Through the above study, the author finds out that631English verbalnominalizations in WCT and WPPT are converted into163Chinese verbalnominalizations and465non-verbal nominalizations which fall into verbs, nouns andphrases. The author hopes this study may help the readers have a better understandingof English and Chinese verbal nominalization and serve as a reference for theconversion of English verbal nominalization into Chinese in legal translation.