On Translating Postpositive Attributives From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation Theory

This practice report is based on an English-Chinese translation task.The source text,The super age,was published by the demographer Bradley Schurman in2022.This book mainly expounds on the way two megatrends—declining birth rates and the radical extension of human life—are intersecting to form a supermegatrend,which is upending and reshaping most social,political,cultural,and economic norms.The E-C translation of the book is of great significance socially,which is expected to provide some useful experience and effective measures for China to solve various aging problems at present and in the future.The source text,featuring rigorous logic of language,numerous terminologies and long sentences,falls into the category of social science text,where quite a few postpositive attributives stand in the way of translating for the translator.Therefore,on the basis of the completion of the translation task and under the guidance of Peter Newmark’s communicative translation theory,the translator summaries the methods used to deal with postpositive attributives after identifying,sorting and calculating those corpora with quantitative and qualitative research method.It is expected that this report will provide some reference for future translation practice of this kind while the quality of this translation could be advanced.Taking the style and language features of such texts into account,the translator summarizes and applies eleven translation methods(anaphora,conversion,combination,division,fronting,reconstruction,synthesis,translation into adverbial clause,class shift,translation into independent clause,voice shift)to translate different postpositive attributive structures.The translator finds that: Firstly,as for the translation of different kinds of postpositive attributives in social science texts,both quantitative and qualitative analysis show that fronting is the most commonly used translation method in the E-C translation process.Secondly,there is no stereotyped method for translation,so it is necessary to select the appropriate translation method in specific cases.