A Study On The Translation Motivation Of English Attributive Clauses Into Chinese

Translation is a cross-cultural and cross-language transformational activity, which needssatisfying internal and external textual elements to achieve a successful translted version, sothe researches on the bilingual (English and Chinese) structures have drawn great attentionwith the time going on. As a special linguistic phenomenon of the English language family,attributive clauses are widely used in written works, conveying strict and complicated logicalrelationship and detailed depiction for the development of the given theme. Considering theimportance of its rendering quality in a translated version, many theorists and scholars both athome and abroad have never ignored their comprehensive researches on this topic.This paper, still taking attributive clauses as its research object, choosing the directionof E-C translation, is about to conduct a study on the translation motivations of Englishattributive clause into Chinese by a careful description of what the translator has ever thoughtconfronting with the attributive clauses and analyzing in detail the measures she has taken todeal with them in the practical translating process and illustrating the reasons for supportingher strategies.Ulysses S. Grant is chosen as materials, which is a short biography written by MichaelKorda, a famous modern American writer, and is treated as a vivid introduction to one of theAmerican most enigmatic historical giants. No wonder once published by Harper Perennial in2009, floods of appreciation came back. Ulysses S. Grant soon found its place in thebest-sellers. Besides this, it is actually a short but extremely informative and absorbing book,and has a great historical and biographical reference. And the most outstanding feature of thisbook is Michael Korda’ s unusual technique of building the structure of the text with themeans of excellent usage of attributive clauses, which, in other side, become a big obstacle fortranslation. This paper will take a theoretical basis on the previous research achievements onsyntactical level, especially Chomsky’s deep structure, which suggests the possibility oftransferring between two different languages in spite of their sharp difference in thesurface structure, and also borrow some other academic achievements from literarytranslation and biography translation. Meanwhile, the principle of “Think AloudProtocols” in the translation teaching has also been put into the paper. The principle aimsto present the cognitive process of the translator, or the trainee in the translating behavior,which will benefit teachers to better understand students or trainees’ thinking mode and tofind better ways to solve their specific problems in the actual situation of translation.The predicted result of the paper is to describe objectively what a translator or atrainee has really done to do with the attributive clauses involved in the text of the shortbiography Ulysses S. Grant and what the implications and suggestions for translationteaching have also been conveyed to us in the last part of this paper.