The Translation Strategies On The Nominalized Structures Of English Academic Writings

The text to be translated for the thesis is the Introduction part of Retranslation:Translation,Literature and Reinterpretation,an academic work written by Sharon Deane-Cox.So far,despite that theoretical discussions on the translation strategies of many other subjects have become a common phenomenon,the exploration of the translation of academic writings still remains rather rare.This partly owes to the characteristics of academic texts,marked by frequent use of jargons,nominalizations and a formal style of writing which make it difficult to translate for those translators who do not have the knowledge of the field.Therefore,the author,a student majoring in English Translation,chose an academic work on translation studies in the hope of shedding some light on the academic translation by discussing how to translate the commonly-seen nominalized structures in the selected text.The case study is adopted as the research method in the thesis.Firstly,collect the nominalizations in the text.Secondly,sort out the examples in accordance with the classification of the nominalizations which include mainly two kinds as lexical and sentential nominalization.Specifically,the former one can be divided into nominalization of verbs and adjectives and the latter one nominalization of gerund,infinitive and that-and wh-clauses which function as noun phrases.Thirdly,explore the applicability of the existing ways to deal with these structures mainly based on the ideas from Li Bingnian and Yan Jingmin and introduce new translation methods.In the process of conducting this case study,the author finds the papers from China National Knowledge Infrastructure(CNKI)are not all-inclusive and provide no thorough understanding with focus mostly on the lexical level.Thereupon,the author makes an attempt to cover the sentential nominalization and draws a conclusion on the basis of the existing intellectual discussions and her own practice that the following techniques can be adopted to translate these structures:literal translation,conversion,amplification,omission,substitution and division.Besides,two or more of these techniques can go together if needed.