On The Translation Of Some Adjectives In A Vigorous Spirit Of Enterprise (Excerpts)

The report is based on the excerpted translation of the book entitled A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia.This book is written by Tomas M.Doerflinger,an American historian.It is a social,economic,and political study focusing on Philadelphia merchants around the period of the American Revolution.The translation of this book is cooperatively accomplished by seven classmates,and the author is responsible for the last section of the Chapter Five and all the sections of Chapter Six.When translating the selected excerpt,the author encounters a number of adjectives that are difficult to deal with.They serve as different components in the sentences,and if the author fails to convey their actual meanings,it will easily lead to implicitness and obscure expressions,which will even influence the readers’ understanding of the ST.Therefore,based on the translation of the selected excerpt,the author sorts out and analyzes the difficulties of translating English adjectives,and tries to work out corresponding translation methods for different kinds of adjectives,hoping to have a deeper understanding of this part of speech and master certain ways to translate it.The author classifies the adjectives on the syntactic level according to different roles they play in the sentences,and they are mainly divided into three categories,namely,attributive adjectives,predicative adjectives and adjective phrases.By contrast,attributive adjectives are used more frequently than predicative adjectives,while the adjective phrases are used the least.In order to achieve the equivalence between the ST and the TT as possible as she can,the author mainly resorts to six translation methods to deal with the adjectives she encounters in the translation process,namely,semantic adjustment,restructuring,use of a four-character expression,conversion,amplification and expansion to a sentence structure.Among them,the author applies the previous three to translate attributive adjectives,conversion and amplification are used to deal with the translation of predicative adjectives,and expansion to a sentence structure is applied to handle the translation of adjective phrases.Through the translation project,the author realizes that although adjectives are widely used in English,it is not easy to translate them into Chinese accurately.Meanwhile,it is necessary to make sense of the context firstly so that the translator can figure out the profound meaning of the adjectives.Moreover,the difficulties on adjective translation and corresponding translation methods mentioned in the report also serve as an experience and guidance for the author’s future translation practices.