A Register Approach To Translating Encyclopedia Of Clothing And Fashion

Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, a great work written and compiled by Valerie Steele, an senior American historian, gives a thorough and detailed introduction to clothing and fashion as well as their evolution. The present author selected five sections from Volume Three as the translation material, i.e., Outerwear, Shoes Women’s, Unisex-Clothing, Wedding Costume and Rings. The Encyclopedias feature rich information, specialized technical terms and complex sentences. Based on register theory,the thesis explores the utmost equivalence in terms of field, tenor and mode and approaches such aspects as nouns(phrases)and complex sentences.This thesis sets out with Halliday’s division of register factors, namely, language field factors affect discourse structure and word selection; tenor factors define communicators and their relationship; language pattern factors determine written form or colloquial style. In that way, the translation problems are sorted out in different groups. The author takes account of the language features of encyclopedias as well as relevant contextual information in translating the selected data, especially complex sentences and specialized expressions. The author also discusses how register theory is applied in encyclopedia translation.