Translation Strategies For Postpositive Attributives In Agricultural English

The source text of this translation project is an agricultural English text in the title of"Cellulose Synthesis in Higher Plants" written by Chris Somerville(2006).According to the text typology of Reiss(1971),this is a context-focused informative text.An important feature of this text is that a large number of postpositive attributives of different types are used,including adjective phrase,prepositional phrase,non-finite verb phrase and attributive clause,which make the translation project difficult.After studying related literature,the writer has found that there is little research on translation strategies for postpositive attributives in agricultural English,and most of the existing researches are foucused on the analysis of difficult long sentences from Englisn into Chinese.Researchers have not classified the types of difficult long sentences.This translation project makes use of Skopos Theory and the three rules ofFunctionalist Theory,i.e.skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule to deal with the challenges in the translation process.The purpose is to produce a translation which is concise,faithful and coherent to the source version,while also being in line with the expressing habits of Chinese language.To achieve the translation purpose,five translation methods are used in rendering the postpositive attributives in the source text:displacement,conversion,division,combination,and synthetic method.This commentary discusses the effects of the translation methods,illustrated by some translation examples.