| Serving as the source text for the translation practice,the book,The Secret World of Weather,introduces different weather phenomena to readers and tells them how to interpret weather through the surrounding scenes and clues.The book is well worth translating,for it is intended for helping readers understand the cause and process of climate change and popularizing effectively meteorological knowledge.The excerpt of the translation material elaborates microclimate,heat and convection,dew and frost,etc.There are plenty of inanimate subjects in these chapters of the source text,which preferably reflects the objectivity of science and technology text.Belonging to different language families,English and Chinese differ from each other in ways of thinking and expressing.Moreover,language is one of the most prominent embodiments of a nation’s ideology and culture.Inanimate subject in English serves as a unique linguistic phenomenon.It is widely used in English,but relatively rare in Chinese,which might result in some difficulties in English-Chinese translation.By making a comparative study of both languages,we can see the similarities and differences in thinking patterns and cultural beliefs,which is helpful to improve the quality of translation.Therefore,from the perspective of English-Chinese contrastive study,this paper explores and summarizes four translation strategies of English sentences with inanimate subject: retaining inanimate subject,translating inanimate subject into other sentence components(i.e.object,adverbial and independent clause),omitting inanimate subject and translating into Chinese animate subject.This report can be divided into five parts.The first chapter introduces the background of the translation report,the main content and characteristics of the source text.The second chapter briefly introduces the translation process,including pre-task work,while-task work and post-task work.Chapter three summarizes the research status of inanimate subject at home and abroad,which provides a solid theoretical basis for the author’s research.Chapter four mainly summarizes the definition of inanimate subject,outlining the classification of inanimate subject and analyzing the differences between English and Chinese subjects,.Case study is presented in chapter five,which explores the inanimate subject in the text from the perspective of English-Chinese contrastive study,and thus analyzes the applicable and effective translation strategies.Chapter six generalizes the translation report and points out its shortcomings. |
