A Report On The Strategies For Translating Long Sentences In Marine Accident Investigation Reports

In the past few decades, the international maritime transportation industry has developed rapidly when the shipping trades between China and other countries became more frequent. Therefore maritime English is becoming more important in the development of China shipping industry. Marine accident investigation report is an important part of maritime English.Marine accident investigation report is a written report that the ship refers to the proper authorities which is about the collision, fire, stranding and other marine casualties on the voyage or anchor. With the investigation to the casualties, marine accident investigation report can verify the description of the incident, find out the reason and give professional advices for the incident to avoid that similar incidents happen again. And the writing of marine accident investigation report is an essential step of marine accident investigation, for which the International Maritime Organization has given clear rules about the writing format of the English marine accident investigation report in the circular IMO A.953. This report analyzes the properties of the sentences in English marine accident investigation report and summarizes the methods to translate by translating the official maritime accident investigation reports from English speaking countries.The theory that this report based on is Nida’s functional equivalence theory. In functional equivalence theory, everything in one language can be expressed in another language. And communication among different languages and cultures can be realized by finding out translation equivalence and recombining the meaning in the source language. This report analyzes the properties and translation methods in English marine accident investigation report and divides the methods into following the original syntactic order, changing non-finite verbal forms and phrases into sentences and reinventing sentences structures according to how much the source texts have been changed. Following the original syntactic order can be divided into making pause following the original order, inversion and changing the sentence segmentations. In the part of changing non-finite verbal forms and phrases into sentences, the report discusses the situation when translating the non-finite verbal forms and phrases into sentences. Changing the sentence segmentations can be divided into partial recombination and the whole sentence recombination.It hopes that this report can provide a reference to the study and writing of the marine accident investigation report by studying the sentences and translating methods of marine accident investigation report.