Translation Of English Adjectives: A Study Of The Translated Excerpts From The Second Mountain:The Quest For A Moral Life

This report is based on the translation of The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life.The book is written by David Brooks,a famous conservative scholar in the United States.In this book,Brooks explores four commitments that define the meaning and purpose of life and aims to help people live a more meaningful life.Therefore,the author hopes that the translation of this book can bring inspirations to people around.The translation of this book is a cooperative project,with six classmates in charge,and the author is responsible for the second and the third part of the book.In the translating process,the author finds that there are a large number of vivid adjectives describing the characteristics of things or expressing characters' attitudes and emotions.If improperly handled,they could easily lead to unintelligible and obscure expressions,and even overshadow the meaning of the modified nouns.Therefore,the author takes the excerpts as corpus to sort out and analyze the difficulties of translating English adjectives,hoping to have a deepening understanding of English adjectives and master more translation skills.The author classifies the adjectives used in the excerpts according to their roles in the sentences: attributive adjectives and predicative adjectives.Both of them play an important role in improving the vividness of the ST.Comparatively speaking,attributive adjectives have a larger share in the excerpts than the predicative ones,and attributive adjectives boast more forms,which is the difficulty the author mainly encounters in the translating process.To maximally achieve the equivalence between the ST and the TT,the author adopts five translation methods to deal with them:semantic adaption,four-character structure,restructuring,conversion and amplification.Among these five translation methods,the first three are used to render attributive adjectives,while the last two are adopted to deal with predicative adjectives.Through this translation project,the author realizes that the translation of English adjectives seems simple but actually very complex.Especially when there is a transferred epithet,translators should be more careful.Also,context is really indispensable to the accurate translation of adjectives.The difficulties and specific translation methods proposed in this report also provide experience and guidance for the author's future translation practice.