A Report On English-Chinese Translation Of Long Sentences In Academic Texts

Since China has increased its communications with other countries in academia,Chinese translation of academic texts becomes even more important.The book International Encyclopedia of Education(the 3rd Edition)includes 926 articles written by hundreds of experts and scholars and discusses various aspects of education.And it can provide full information of education for domestic scholars and promote the discipline construction.The source text of this translation project is taken from four papers on educational assessment in volume 3 of this book.They are typical academic texts and frequently use long sentences.These long sentences have rigorous logic with various modifiers,coordinate constituents and subordinate clauses and frequently use passive voice,which poses great challenges to the author.Nida’s functional equivalence theory stresses the closest natural equivalence of the source language message and emphasizes reader’s response,which corresponds to the purpose of accurately conveying source language message and making readers understand of the translation of English academic texts.Thus,under the guidance of the functional equivalence theory,the author considers the syntactic differences between English and Chinese,and finally adopts appropriate translation methods for long sentences,the major difficulty in this translation project.During the translation process,the author revises the target text several times in order to achieve the best results.Based on the translation practice,the author writes this report to analyze and summarize the translation methods for long sentences in English academic texts.In this report,the author firstly summarizes the features of long sentences in English academic texts.Then,guided by the functional equivalence theory and based on the syntactic differences between English and Chinese,the author discusses the translation methods she used for long sentences in detail by analyzing typical examples,including syntactic linearity,inversion,division,conversion,addition and omission.By doing this project,the author concludes that when translating long sentences in English academic texts,one should firstly analyze the original sentence structures and find out the sentence trunks,and then sort out grammatical and logical relationships between sentence constituents.After analyzing the language meanings,he/she should flexibly use various translation methods based on the syntactic differences between English and Chinese,trying to make the target text accurate and smooth with clear logic and conform to the Chinese language conventions.By writing this report,the author summarizes the translation methods she used for long sentences in the translation practice.And the author hopes that her own experience in translating English academic texts can provide some references for others.