Referring And Expanding: On Verbal Nominalization In News Translation

Many translation strategies are employed in modern broadcasting. Nominalization is one of those that are common universally. It is a way to transform clause complex, clauses and other forms into grammatical metaphor.Lots of scholars have done adequate research on grammatical metaphor, but it seems that they have not focused very much on the combination of grammatical metaphor with translation studies. The focus of the present study therefore, is to work out its play in the process of translating from Chinese into English. Nominalizing is one of the most powerful resources for creating grammatical metaphor. The translation strategies applied will be provided for the news translation where a lot of cases of nominalization are available.Nominalization functions in two aspects in Halliday's functional grammar namely referring and expanding. The study method to use the above two functions of nominalization in a way that can explore translation strategies hasn't been found in many papers as far as my knowledge is concerned. Due to the formality brought by nominalization, it is widely used in the C-E news translation. The present study will explore the application of nominalization on the news translation. Firstly, the concept and the function of nominalization are introduced. Verbal nominalization is a kind of nominalization that is defined as the transformation from process to entity, causing grammatical displacement and subtle variation in meaning. In functional terms, those changes are described as the grammatical movement in rank and in function. What categorizations of verbally nominalized forms in English news under Chinese context are and what translation strategies can be derived under different categorizations would be investigated with a large sum of data, in the hope that minor dedication can be made to the areas of the news translation from Chinese into English. In the present study, translation strategies are discussed according to referring and expanding. Examples will be used for exploring translation strategies in terms of the both two functions.Examples are collected from 29 documents of bilingual editions from 2005 Beijing Review, which are newly issued government regulations, measures, policies, white papers and so on. English examples are firstly classified into three types according to the static feature of verbal nominalization's referring. Then the further classification is made on the basis of part of speech of their corresponding Chinese. In a word there are two steps in terms of categorization. Analyses are conducted after each example made up of one Chinese source clause and one English target clause. Conclusions are reached on translation strategies from the point of referring and expanding in each categorization. Apart from regular translation strategies, brief analyses are also made on some irregular examples.Nominalization is a platform that may be a start point of analyzing translation strategies in complex texts and may greatly facilitate the speed and the accuracy of translation. Because nominalization has an important position in translation, translation process becomes much delighting after the difficulties of nominalization are resolved.