A Comparative Study On English And Chinese Nominalization And Its Translation: An Aesthetical Perspective

Nominalization is a very common but interesting linguistic phenomenon in English. According to the definition in Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, nominalization is any process by which either a noun or a syntactic unit functioning as a noun phrase derived from any other kind of unit such as a verb or an adjective. Frequent use of nominalization is one of the most prominent features of scientific and technical writings to meet the technical and reasoning features of scientific and technical writings as well as of written English and formal style because correct use of it can make the discourses brief, rigorous, reasonable and objective. For these reasons, the nature and functions of nominalization have been largely investigated from different approaches, arriving at different conclusions, which offer some directions for the research of nominalization.Despite great contributions made by these previous researchers, some limitations still exist and most of the studies focus on nominalization in English and there are fewer attempts to study nominalization in the Chinese. The present thesis, based on previous studies of nominalization found prominent especially in scientific and technical writings in the English language, makes a tentative attempt to study nominalization in Chinese texts for further comparison of nominalization between English and Chinese, which will offer some guidelines for the translation of English nominalization to Chinese.As the ideational and morphological differences between English and Chinese, there is no exception of nominalization. In this thesis, the author firstly makes an overall morphological comparison of nominalization between English and Chinese, and then analyzes the differences of structures and grammatical functions both on lexical and syntactic levels. Traditionally, English is synthetic language in which there are various ways to form nominalization through affixes, while Chinese is analytic language in which nominalization is formed by means of word order and empty words rather than by means of morphological changes. However, through the present thesis, it is found that there are some regular affixes as the morphological markers of nominalizations in Chinese and what is more important is that corresponding relationships of nominalization structures can be found between Chinese and English.After the comparative analysis of nominalization structure, the author further explores general corresponding forms and structures of nominalizations between English and Chinese, which are served as the basis for the translation of English nominalization to Chinese from the perspective of aesthetic ablation and retaining.Correct use of nominalization can achieve the aesthetic effects of brevity, formalness, objectivity and cohesion. In the translation processes of nominalizations, due to the differences of the two languages and nominalization structures, equivalent translations do exist but rarely. So the aesthetic ablations are unavoidable. Then how to retain those aesthetic ablations is the problem. The general rule is free translation based on literal translation, which is the key method to retain aesthetic effect of translation directly. In other words, a translator should try his best to retain the aesthetic effects in the source text. If there are corresponding structures in Chinese for the English nominalization, translate it literally, especially, the -of structure in English andçš„-structure in Chinese. If the aesthetic effects cannot be retained directly (that is, they can be retained indirectly), some compensation methods should be taken to keep them. As nominalization is a device by which processes (verbs) and properties (adjectives) are reworded metaphorically as nouns, the translation process of nominalization in English can be regarded as a reversion process, that is nominalization in English can often be translated into other forms such as verbal groups, adjectives and even clauses, etc.. Indeed, the E-C nominalization translation is just like a "seesaw battle", trying to seek for a balance between literal translation and free translation, aesthetic ablation and retaining.