An Analysis Of Rankshifting In English And Its Implications On Translation

This thesis, based on an analysis of the two major categories of English rankshifted constructions — nominalizations and relative clauses in terms of their cognitive and linguistic bases and their operating mechanisms, investigates the strategies that translators are supposed to take in translating nominalizations and relative clauses into Chinese. A qualitative approach is adopted in the study.The analyses show that the occurrence of nominalizations and relative clauses owes to the syntactic configurations available in English and the interplay of the principles of iconic proximity, iconic quantity and Least Effort.Nominalizations and relative clauses operate in accordance with textual, stylistic, pragmatic and informational factors. Nominalizing can cause intra-clausal changes and realignment of clausal elements, make some clausal elements more prominent, contribute to organizing a text, and help achieve prominence of textual semantic macro-structure, build up the stylistic features of certain kind of texts and generate presuppositions. And the use of nominalizations in EST texts can still achieve writer-reader co-operation. As to the operations of relative clauses, informational factors matter a lot. A defining relative clause is closely combined with its matrix clause to form a complete information unit, while a non-defining relative clause is itself an information unit. Normally, the information embodied in a relative clause is less important or relevant to the current conversational topic than that in the matrix clause. But a marked relative clause can also embody information that is more important/prominent. Moreover, the use of relative clauses can contribute to generating presuppositions and lead to specification defeasibility.The above analyses show some light on translation of English nominalizations and relative clauses. Nominalizations, in some cases, should be translated into Chinese nominalized constructions. By so doing, the intra-clausal prominence of the nominalized process, the prominence of textual semantic...