Strategies For Translating Parenthesis From English To Chinese

American economist Alan S.Blinder’s book A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States,1961-2021 discusses the historical evolution of monetary and fiscal policy decisions in the United States,providing useful experience for appropriately using monetary and fiscal policies to maintain economic stability.The translator selects the first two chapters of this book as the translation materials,which include many parentheses that constitute certain degree of translation difficulty.Proper translation of the parentheses partly affects readers’ understanding of the source text.Scholars at home and abroad have carried out detailed research on parentheses,including the definition,classification and function of parentheses,but research on the translation strategies of parentheses still needs to be further developed,especially those in economic texts..Based on Halliday’s theory of metafunction,the translator adopts case study as the research methodology and analyzes the ideational,interpersonal,and textual functions of parentheses in the source text.Based on the above functional classifications,the translator refers to translation strategies put forth in the previous literature and summarizes six translation methods,including retaining the original form and position,using parenthesis marks,adding words,embedding,inversion,and restructuring.Corresponding examples are given in each category for analysis,in which the functions of parentheses are pointed out first and then the reasons for adopting such strategy are explained.It is found that there is a certain tendency for parentheses with different functions in the selection of translation strategies.For ideational parentheses,many factors should be considered when choosing translation strategies,including the position of parentheses in the source text,whether it conforms to the Chinese language order,etc.As for the interpersonal and textual parentheses,the inversion strategy is more often used because they generally do not conform to the Chinese expression habit.It should also be noted that more than one translation strategy will be used during the translation process,especially when translating complex parentheses.The translation strategy needs to be adopted according to the form and position of parentheses.