A Translation Report Of He Shall Signify From Time To Time

The material of this report comes from “ ‘He shall signify from time to time'.Romeo and Juliet in modern English”,an academic paper written by Dirk Delabastita.Since it is an academic paper on translation,it is on one hand full of terms in translation studies and on the other hand filled with compound and complex sentences which bring great difficulties to translation.English sentences are tree-structured with sense groups connected by prepositions and relative pronouns.On the contrary,Chinese sentences are bamboo-structured,following time or logic without so many conjunctions.Thus,Chinese translation from English is apt to be affected by attributives and overflow of long and complicated sentences.The focus of this paper is on the cause,phenomena and the solution of negative transfer in the translation of long and complicated English sentences.To begin with,the concept “negative transfer” is introduced.It mainly causes five types of translationese.Then syntactic differences between English and Chinese are put forward,including hypotaxis and parataxis,passive forms and active forms,front focus and back focus,which bring negative transfer into translation.Major problems including overused conjunctions,unconverted passive forms and unadjusted front focus are respectively discussed.Meanwhile,three methods are proposed to solve these problems in this paper,namely,syntactic division,syntactic restructuring and syntactic conversion.These methods are also used to revise the translation work under the guidance of the features of Chinese so as to achieve smoothness in translation.