Translation Of English Relative Clauses Into Chinese From The Perspective Of Information Structure

New Rome:The Empire in the East explores factors that contributed to the transformation and formation of the Eastern Roman Empire.Its author,Paul Stephenson,presents a vivid picture of Roman life,satisfying the curiosity of the general reader about the Roman world.The book discusses,in light of recent archaeological discoveries,the impact of environmental pollution,climate change,and the spread of disease in the Roman Empire,offering new perspectives for scholars studying the history of the Roman Empire and the rise and fall of other civilizations.This translation report is based on the case study of the translation of the first two chapters of this book to explore answers to questions about restoring relative clauses’ information structure and applying information structure theory to the translation of English relative clauses.In the source text,relative clauses frequently appear in lengthy and complex sentences,posing difficulties for comprehension and translation.In English,relative clauses are nested in layers,highlighting the hypotactic feature of English;but in Chinese,there is no the same grammatical structure.Information in Chinese sentences is mainly arranged in logical and chronological order,making it difficult to deal with the relationship between the main and subordinate clauses and organize the information when translating relative clauses from English into Chinese.This report aims to enhance the understanding of relative clauses and provide inspiration for translating long,complex sentences containing relative clauses.The report’s author explores the translation strategies for relative clauses from the perspective of information structure,focusing on the position of relative clauses and the relationship between given and new information of the main and subordinate clauses.Hopefully,scholars will realize that it is more appropriate to refer to attributive clauses by using the term relative clauses.It is also expected that the strategies for translating relative clauses will be improved by explaining the translation of relative clauses in the report.It is suggested in this report that the translator should consider context,the speaker’s presumptions,the listener’s common sense,and general principles to judge the information status(old or new and primary or secondary)of relative clauses.After such a judgment,one adopts an appropriate strategy to restore the original information structure.This report finds that restrictive relative clauses in the middle and at the end of a sentence do not offer new information.They restrict or modify the antecedent,similar to the construction of Chinese attributives,which can be translated as pre-modifiers with the auxiliary“的”.In particular,by considering the context,speaker’s preconceptions,and common sense,this report’s author argues that the restrictive relative clauses at the end of the sentence in the original text do not provide new information.And therefore,one should avoid translating them as the sentence core and placing them at the end of the sentence.Translating a restrictive relative clause as a clause if it is too long and putting it before the main clause is recommended.A nonrestrictive relative clause describes and supplements the antecedent,carrying relatively new information.Its information status should be emphasized.In particular,the non-restrictive relative clause at the end of a sentence can be translated into a verb phrase,clause,or sentence,placed at the end of the sentence,or in the following sentence to highlight its informational status.At the same time,the report analyzes cases where the translation of a non-restrictive clause at the end of the sentence is pre-posed.Its translation may be pre-posed for coherence or because a non-restrictive relative clause provides background information.Punctuation can also be flexibly employed to emphasize the information status if punctuation like a dash exists in the source text.