English Nominalization And Its Application To Legal C-E Translation

This dissertation began as something of an accident. While working on a dramatically different topic, I was exposed to a good many examples of nominalization in Legal English. Unquenchable curiosity got the better of me, and I became obsessed with the desire to know exactly what happens to nominalization and how to use it. This entailed spending day upon day in libraries, combing through volumes upon volumes of data, doing literary detective work, trying to find some sort of leads that would be helpful in the process of Legal C-E translation. Among the authors of many volumes of data, Mr. Liu Miqing and Mr. Lian Shu'neng, experts in English-Chinese contrastive study, mentioned for more than one time in their works that there is a predominance of nouns in the English language. Indeed, predominance of nouns is typical of the English language. "There is a tendency to use nouns and prepositions frequently in the English language, while in the Chinese language, there is tendency to use verbs frequently." "English nominalization often results in. abstract expression." There are a great number of abstract nouns and many meaning-weakening devices in English, so nominalization prevails especially in social science works, official articles, newspaper reviews, legal documents, commercial letters etc.With its entry into the WTO, China will involve itself in the world's economy more profoundly and widely. In the contemporary highly legalized society, laws are closely concerned with people's economic activities. Overseas investors in China need to learn about China's laws, and to conform to the international business practice, we also need to learn about other countries' laws. Under the circumstances, translation of legal documents becomes increasingly important.But there has been an absence of profound and systematic theory typical of legal document translation. Mr. Chen Zhongcheng has contributed a lot tolegal document translation. His translation is really appreciable, but it is a pity that he has few works on the theory of legal document translation.This dissertation is intended to study the application of English nominalization to legal document translation through an English-Chinese Contrastive Study.The dissertation comprises seven chapters and a conclusion. It opens with a discussion about nominalization and legal English. It is mainly a summary of established work, and is included here to provide a jumping-off point for a detailed illustration of nominalization in Chapters 2-5.Chapter 2 begins with the definition and tries to account for the difference between verbal nouns and deverbal nouns. According to Quirk et al, a noun phrase such as "the quarrel over pay" which has a systematic correspondence with a clause structure is termed.a Nominalization. The noun head of such a phrase is normally related morphologically to a verb, or to an adjective (i.e., a deverbal or deadj'ectival noun). Thus, the -ing morpheme appears in English, accordingly, as the present participle, the verbal gerund and the nominal gerund. However, the author does not think it necessary to distinguish verbal gerund and nominal gerund, so she categorizes the verbal gerund and the nominal gerund into nominalization, and she restricts the term 'nominalization1 to noun or noun-heading construction which have a parallel syntactic structure to the original verb or adjective, including both verbal noun and deverbal noun. The author dwells at length at the differences between verbal noun and deverbal noun to prevent any possible mistakes in the transforming from Chinese verb or adjective into English nominalization. While a bit daunting, a large number of examples have to be employed in this chapter.In Chapter 3, the author gives an extensive survey of nominalization including the agent, the recipient, tense and aspect, voice, negation, number, ambiguity and so on. Chapter 4 presents some useful and useless nominalizations and makes some suggestions on the revision of undesirable nominalizations. Chapter 5 focuses on a contrastive st...