Nominalization And Its Application In Translating English Legislative Texts

In the contemporary society ruled by law, people's social life and economic activities are closely concerned with laws. Especially with the rapid development of globalization and interaction, China becomes more open than ever and makes every effort to have a general understanding about other countries'legal systems and rules. As such, English legislative texts translation into Chinese is of vital importance and becomes a strong pushing force for the international cooperation and communication. As a strong device for creating grammatical metaphor, nominalization expresses processes or events in the incongruent way. It is characterized by an objective, solemn and precise style. Therefore, it is employed in a great number in English legislative texts and is considered as one of the most prominent features in the aforesaid texts. Thus to analyze the functional application of nominalization in the legislative texts and to decipher it into Chinese accordingly becomes necessary for the English legislative texts translation.This thesis aims to give an overall analysis of nominalization in English legislative texts, including its functions and the reasons for its considerable use in such texts. So the translators can have a better understanding of the nominalizations in legislative texts.Then this thesis attempts to give answers to following two questions through some research and analyses:1) Why do abundant nominalizations exist in English legislative texts?2) What kinds of translating strategies can we follow in the translation of nominalizations in English legislative texts?Thirdly, this thesis puts forward two basic principles in the translation of nominalization in English legislative texts. One is the faithfulness, which is regarded as the unchallenged translating principle. The other is the readability, which is used to overcome the overly adhering to the faithfulness. Besides, this thesis cites Nida's analysis-transfer-restructure translation model. The three steps are in natural order and one of them can't be substituted by another. It really provides a good theoretical guide for the translation of nominalizations. Finally, in the translation practice, based on the corpus data of the Constitution of the United States, this thesis follows a clue of translating nominalizations in the level of word, sentence and text. Among the word-level translating strategies include the transference between congruent and incongruent forms, releasing the increased information density, changing nominal structures into verbs, translating the logical relationship concealed in the nominal structures and etc. In the sentence level, this paper deals with the translation of nominalization from the perspective of deep structures. Under every structure, this paper puts forward translating strategies accordingly. In the level of text, this paper talks about the function of nominalization as a cohesive device in the English legislative texts and proposes the translating suggestions.This thesis aims to explore the translating strategies of nominalization in English legislative texts, with a view to understanding the nominalization further and benefiting the English legislative text translation. Hope this exploration may have some theoretical significance and shed some lights on translation practice.