E-C Translation Of Temporal Adverbial Clause

In English grammar, temporal adverbial clause is a much more complicated linguistic phenomenon because of its various forms and meanings. Some temporal adverbial clauses, judging from their forms, may be seriously misled to express temporal concept. And yet, they actually mark an adversative, causative, conditional, concessive, purposive or preference relation existing in the subordinate clause and the main clause in logic. It is because of its special syntactic feature and high frequency of being used that it has been attracting the attraction of quite a few translators and researchers, and a great number of empirical studies have been conducted to probe into the issue of temporal adverbial clauses on distribution of sequence, differences in distribution between Chinese and English, and techniques in their English-Chinese translation during the last three decades. Though English-Chinese translation of temporal adverbial clauses is often involved in many translation works and articles, those studies only described the translation techniques and strategies, and few have been conducted to investigate the characteristics based on parallel corpora in English-Chinese translation.The present study investigates the characteristics of translating temporal adverbial clauses, summarizes their Chinese correspondences and looks into factors behind these features. The data used in this study are all collected from Great Expectation in online English-Chinese Parallel Concordance and another two Chinese versions. The translation of temporal clauses comprises the following features:Taken as a whole, viewed from the point of translation techniques, there is no significant difference among these three Chinese versions in translating temporal adverbial clauses. The majority of temporal adverbial clauses are translated by initial technique no matter what position they lie in, initially or finally. Almost all of those initial temporal adverbial clauses adopt initial technique in their English-Chinese translation while a large number of final temporal clauses precede their main clause by means of initial technique and a few follow the main clause in final technique.In terms of Chinese correspondences, most of those employing initial technique in this study are translated into adverbial adjuncts, coordinate complex sentences together with their main clause expressing a coordinative, successive or contrast relation while the majority of those adopting final technique are translated into coordinate complex sentences together with their main clause expressing a coordinative, successive or contrast relation and few are translated into adverbial adjuncts. Still, a small number of temporal clauses expressing non-temporal meanings are converted into subordinate complex sentences together with the main clause indicating a conditional, adversative, causative, purposive, preference and concessive relationship between the actions or events that take place in the subordinate clause and the main clause.When it comes to the position of the correspondences, most of components expressing temporal concepts precede the main clause or the predicate they modify or restrict, while in English, they follow the main clause in most cases. When temporal clauses are translated into adverbial adjuncts, their Chinese correspondences precede the main clause. When they are translated into other correspondences, the position of their correspondences depends on the temporal or logical relation with the main clause.This study also explores several factors beyond E-C translation of temporal adverbial clauses:culture and syntactic differences between English and Chinese, the context in which temporal adverbial clauses lie in, linear structure, the length and the complexity of subordinate clauses, and translators'style of translating.The findings provide much insight into the characteristics of temporal adverbial clauses in English-Chinese translation. It is imperative that both teachers and students divert more attention to the understanding and expression of the two languages, especially syntactic differences and context. Moreover, teachers are expected to introduce and explain effective strategies in translating temporal adverbial clauses. Also, it is advisable that students know more about Chinese and English and do more practice to translate by themselves.