English-Chinese Translation Of Long And Complex Sentences From The Perspective Of Back-Transformation Theory

Humans have been confronted with an increasing number of global difficulties since the dawn of the twenty-first century,including climate change,air pollution,and energy shortage.And these topics come up for discussion frequently.Therefore,there is a great demand for the translation of popular science texts.How the World Really Works is a popular science book that tells us the seven fundamental realities of the modern world in a simple way.The author selects the introduction and the first chapter of this book as the material for the translation practice report.This part contains many long and complex English sentences,which cause difficulties during translation process.To solve this problem,the author adopts Eugene Nida’s back-transformation theory to help analyze the sentence structure of these sentences.The process of back-transformation is divided into three stages:analysis,transfer,and restructuring.The author first identifies the kernel sentences by analyzing the deep structure of the long and complex sentences in the original text;then obtains the deep structure of the target language by translating those kernel sentences into the target language;and then rearranges the material following the target language’s idiomaticity.Based on Nida’s back-transformation theory,the author applies four translation methods:sequencing,reversing,division,and comprehensive translation.When long and complex English has a time sequence or logical order that is consistent with Chinese,the sequencing is usually adopted.When long and complex sentences have embedded clauses,modifiers,etc.,or the time sequence or logical order is inconsistent with that of Chinese,the reversing is adopted.When the English sentence structure needs to be broken into two sentences to prevent lengthy and drawn-out statements,the method is adopted.Yet,there are situations when it may not be acceptable to apply only one method since the translator cannot achieve the greatest results by adopting that method.In this case,the translator shall combine several techniques in the translation process to ensure that the translation adheres to the Chinese mode of expression.This paper,taking popular science text as an example,explores the approaches to translating long and complex English sentences based on the back-transformation theory.The author hopes that it will provide reference and value for the future translation and research of long and complex English sentences in similar texts.