A Comparative Study About Chinese And English Nominalization And The Effects Upon Non-english Majors’Bilingual Translation

Nominalization is a universal phenomenon in human languages which has attracted the attention of scholars of different schools. In1985, the best representative of systemic functional linguists M. A. K. Halliday put forward the concept of "grammatical metaphor" in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar. And he points out nominalizing is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor. By this device, processes (congruently worded as verbs) and properties (congruently worded as adjectives) can be reworded metaphorically as nouns. Instead of functioning as Process or Attribute in the clause, they function as Thing in the nominal group.This paper starts with an introduction to the definition and the categorization of grammatical metaphor, in the hope of making clear the relationship between grammatical metaphor and nominalization and laying the foundation for a comparative study between Chinese nominalization and English nominalization.This paper is dedicated to a comparative study, focusing on the five types of nominalization, namely taking process as thing, taking quality as thing, taking circumstance as thing, taking relator as thing and taking assessment as thing. This paper tries to make a comparative study about Chinese and English nominalizations, with the word formation bringing into the framework of the categorization of nominalization. The study shows the similarities between mainly lie in the increase of conciseness, cohesion and coherence, and objectivity in the discourses, and there are differences between the nominalizations in the two languages mainly due to the different language systems each belong to and people’s different ways of thinking.This paper also explores the effects upon non-English majors’ Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation based on a survey into the application of nominalization in their bilingual translation and a study of the attention paid to nominalization, particularly the translation part in the tests of CET-4and CET-6from July,2006to July2011. The research aims to provide feasible strategies in translation teaching and give practical suggestions to students" bilingual translation, thus realizing the significance of the study to translation teaching and study.