Strategies For Translating Nominalized Structures In English Academic Texts

The text of this practice report is taken from the introduction and the first chapter of Pirates of Empire,a historical study by Swedish historian Stefan Eklof Amirell.The author selected introduction and chapter one for translation.This book is an academic monograph on the history of piracy and colonization in Southeast Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries,which contains a large number of academic text words,sentences expressing more nominal structures,and a more formal and serious style.Therefore,the author chose this academic book for the translation practice report,and discusses the translation methods of nominalized structures,thus conduct a thorough research on nominalized structures and provide some ideas and insights for the translation of academic texts.Case study is the main method adopted to analyze the translation strategies for nominalized structures in academic texts and the author explains the reason for choosing such translation strategies.According to previous studies on this field,the author classifies the nominalized structures and tries to develop a set of translation strategies and explain them in accordance with the cases.The author of this report summarizes her translation methods into three major categories,namely grammatical level,semantic level and logical level.The translation strategies included in each level are listed as follows.On the grammatical level:(1)noun/action noun+preposition+noun,this structure can be translated into subject+predicate structure or verb+objective structure;and(2)preposition+noun/action noun,this structure can be translated into prepositional phrases;on the semantic level:adding category words,shifting the part of speech,and literal translation;and on the logic level:omission and division.Besides,two or more of these strategies can be used together if needed.