The Translation Of English Conjunctions

The translation project in this paper is Encyclopedia of Energy,Natural Resource and Environmental Economics,entrusted by Academy of Chinese Energy Strategy.The whole book consists of three chapters,which contains over 100 front-end articles in the energy field all over the world.The study text is a selection of chapter 3,in which terminologies of environmental economics and long sentences are frequently used.So the context should be taken into account to obtain a precise understanding of the original text and thus ensure the quality of the translation.This paper chooses conjunctions as the study object,for two reasons.Firstly,the text is informative and has rigorous logic.In general,conjunctions play an important part in the realization of discourse cohesion.Secondly,translators may tend to pay more attention to notional words than function words and translate conjunctions hastily.Therefore,how to choose proper translation strategies to better replay the logical relationship of the original in the translation,deliver the information of the original to readers,and achieve the greatest degree of functional equivalence turns to be the focus in this translation project.This paper mainly adopts the case study method,namely,a comparative analysis on two translated versions by studying the translation of conjunctions in the project.Taking Eugene Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory as the guiding principle,the paper explores the translation steps and methods of conjunctions from the perspective of the difference of hypotaxis and parataxis between English and Chinese,and generalizes three common strategies,namely,hypotaxis translation,parataxis translation,and meaning-focus translation.In the context,translators are advised to choose a proper translation strategy by considering both Functional Equivalence Theory and hypotaxis and parataxis.This paper is of practical significance.There is a tendency for translators to ignore the importance of function words during translation.The paper explores three strategies for translating English conjunctions by analyzing a large number of examples in thetranslation project,which may help translators to improve translation quality.