| This report is based on the E-C translation of the first chapter of Globalizing Cities: A Brief Introduction,an informative text written by Mark Abrahamson and published in 2020.This book clearly distinguishes economic,cultural,and political processes to demonstrate how global attachments are shaping many of the basic features of modern cities.Based on a qualitative analysis of the features of the text,the translation of sentences with inanimate subjects was chosen as the research subject.Many objective statements are widely used to illustrate the facts,thus leading to a lot of inanimate,nominalized,passive and abstract tendencies in the text.From the perspective of conceptual metaphor of cognitive linguistic and ideational grammatical metaphor of systemic-functional linguistic,the inanimate subject is divided into three categories,including “Inanimate Subject + Animate Verb”,“Material Process as Subject” and“There + be” Structure.In the light of “Ideational Grammatical Metaphor”(IGM)theory from the systemic-functional linguistics proposed by M.A.K.Halliday,three corresponding translation strategies are proposed,including shifts of subject,shifts of structure and shift of process.As a unique language phenomenon in English written texts,sentences with inanimate subjects set great difficulty for E-C translation,especially coupled with the differences in ways of thinking between the East and West.Aimed at exploring the causes and features of inanimate subjects and relevant translating methods in this respect,this paper investigates the translation under the guidance of IGM,with its special focus on translation methods of the inanimate subjects,hoping to shed some light on the translation of inanimate subjects in informative texts. |
