On The E-C Translation Of Adverbial Clause In Academic Discourse From The Perspective Of Iconicity

Adverbial clause is a highly frequent linguistic phenomenon in the English grammar system,with a large number of varieties and complex logical relations of expression.In the past few decades,many scholars have focused on the translation of English adverbial clauses,using a large amount of corpus from English novels,financial English,business English and scientific English to analyze the differences between English and Chinese in terms of the position of adverbial clauses and the way of their cohesion with the main sentence.By now,a large number of academic articles have been delivered to discuss the strategies and skills of translating English adverbial clauses into Chinese,but there is still a lack of research in academic works.This paper will take the academic book Nature,Society,and Justice in the Anthropocene as the research object.This book is concise in language,compact in logic,and abstract in content.Besides,there are a large number of adverbial clauses frequently appearing in the paper,which are difficult to translate into Chinese.Cognitive linguistics holds that language does not directly reflect the objective world,and there is a “cognitive” intermediary between language and the objective world.Language and language organization reflect the general principles of human cognition.Therefore,from the perspective of cognitive translatology,the author will analyze the differences between Chinese and English.In accordance with the principle of iconicity,this paper analyzes its guiding significance for E-C translation of adverbial clauses in academic texts from three perspectives: sequential iconicity,distance iconicity and quantity iconicity.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows.First of all,there are differences in the order of sentences between Chinese and English.Therefore,in order to conform to the Chinese expression habits,translators should adopt linear translation or inverse translation according to the principle of sequential iconicity.Secondly,English has a strong grammatical system and many cohesive devices.When dealing with the distance relation between clauses and main clauses,translators can restore the distance relation of the original text through splitting translation or combination according to the principle of distance iconicity.Finally,the translation of adverbial clauses must adhere to the principle of quantitative iconicity.If the structure of the original text is complex and there are many modifiers,it can be translated into Chinese flowing sentences by splitting translation.