A Study Of The E-C Translation Of Premodifiers Of Nouns In News English

On the basis of the translation of articles selected from English newspapers and magazines, the thesis probes into the E-C translation of premodifiers of nouns in News English.Premodifiers of nouns are the words put in front of nouns which have descriptive and decorative functions. Widely used in English and Chinese, premodifiers of nouns in both languages have the same functions of description and modification, and share the same features of using multiple premodifiers. On the other hand, they differ in the two languages in terms of categories, part of speech and the ordering of multiple premodifiers.News is written in a special style and is characterized by conciseness and clarity in language. In order to save space and to condense information, it is very common to use multiple modifiers before nouns in English news. For this purpose, there are mainly two categories, namely, modifiers of the same grammatical category which precede a noun and multiple modifiers before a noun. The former falls into two subcategories: a single word is used as the premodifier of a noun and two or over two words of the same part of speech are put before a noun.The research shows that there are mainly two strategies for E-C translation of premodifiers of nouns in English news:translating it into modifiers and translating it into non-premodifiers. Under the first circumstance, literal translation is often used because in Chinese attributes are generally put in front of nouns; what’s more, amplification can be used to complete the sentence. Under the second circumstance, the translator is supposed to adopt translation kills flexibly, such as converting the part of speech and splitting the modifiers. As English has an advantage in static state, whereas Chinese has an advantage in dynamic state, the translator can convert premodifiers into verbs to build the subject-predicate structure.