E-C Translation Of Attributive Clauses In The Informative Text

As an international problem,drugs have been raging on every spot of the earth,including the western developed countries as well as the developing countries.The cases of drug production,drug traffic and drug smoking have been anything but a controlled problem,and the number of drug smoker has been increasing with each passing day（蒋和平,2005:109）.Drug deteriorates people’s health,brings enormous wealth loss and triggers extensive social problems,thus considered as the trickiest problem whose crackdown depends on the co-work of people all over the world.In America,according to the statistical data provided by the Federal government,the number of drug smoker has amounted to nearly 50 million,which accounts for 12%or so of the whole population.Even President Barack Obama once admitted that he had smoked drug as a teenager.What’s worse,the habit of smoking drugs began to spread among schoolboys,and the average age of smoking drugs for the first time is16.8.In this paper,the author will focus on analyzing the translation of the attributive clause through its definition,classification,and translation strategies under the guidance of Peter Newmark’s text typology theory.First of all,in term of the guiding theory,Newmark divided texts into expressive texts,informative texts and vocative texts in accordance with their functions.This paper takes the book Drugs and Drug Policy in America,which is composed of 13 parts,as the corpus.It is a documentation history of the anti-drug policy of the United States in the 20^th century.Because of its documentary property,the book naturally concentrates on telling the readers truth,which makes it an information-intensive text.The main obstacle the group members encountered when translating this book was how to translate long strings of English sentences（especially the attributive clauses）into shorter and more compact ones in Chinese.To be more specific,the analysis of the attributive clause can be divided into the following three parts---definition,classification,and its translation strategies.By definition,the attributive clause is a simple sentence that follows after a noun or pronoun to serve as the modifier.On the basis of the understanding of its definition,the author can further study the antecedent and the relative words of the attributive clause which impose significant influence on the translation of the attributive clause.The attributive clause can be broadly divided into two categories,namely the restrictive attributive clause and the non-restrictive attributive one.Both of them fulfill the function of modification,but there are still some differences.For example,they take on different forms and play different roles in sentences,and their antecedents have different contents and the relative words have different usage.The translation strategies include translating it into pre-modifier,sentence,and adverbial clause,and it can also be mixed into the main clause.Through in-depth study of the characteristics of the attributive clause and its corresponding translation strategies,the author gets a more systematic understanding of the E-C translation of the attributive clause.At the same time,the author hopes this study will be helpful to those who specialize in translation work in the future.