Translation Strategies Of Parentheses In Economic Text

The translation materials are from the latest 22 news reports on The Economist website.The Economist is a world-famous economic journal,in which a lot of excellent economic review articles are included.The language of the articles in The Economist has distinctive features,besides many economic terms,the use of parentheses is also very frequent.As an important part in economic text expression,the parentheses often breaks the continuity of the sentence structurally and semantically,which brings great challenges to the translation,so that the translation strategies of parentheses are worthy of study and discussion.Economic news belongs to informative text.Reiss’ s text type translation theory proposes that in the translation of informative text,semantics should be placed in the most important position and the language expression of the translation must conform to the logic and reading habits of the target readers.The parentheses are closely related to other parts of the sentences in semantics,in order to accurately convey the original information,the semantic connection between the parentheses and the sentence cannot be ignored in translation.The report sets the semantic functions of parentheses as the basis of classification,and divides the parentheses of the economic text into five categories: explanation,supplementary specification,attitudes’ demonstration,indication of the sentences’ relations and emphasis.In this translation report,five translation strategies of parentheses under different classifications are also proposed: preposition,symbol insertion,construction,sequence adjustment and no treatment.The symbol insertion includes dash insertion and brackets insertion and the sequence adjustment includes sentence-head and sentence-end.In the specific cases,it is found that the preposition and dash insertion methods are generally applied in the translation of parentheses that play the role of explanation,the construction and brackets insertion methods for the parentheses that play the role of supplementary specifications.It is also found that the sentence-head method for the parentheses that play the role of attitudes’ demonstration and indication of sentences’ relations,while the no treatment and sentence-end methods for the parentheses that play the role of emphasis.Based on text type translation theory,the semantic functions of parentheses are classified and different translation strategies are explored under different categories in economic text.This research will offer some inspirations for the future practice of parentheses translation.