On Translation Of English Attributive Clauses

Among all types of English clauses, attributive clause is the most common, widely-used and complex one. It isfound in various genres, such as English poetry, prose, science fiction, business documents and legal documents, in which manyattributive clauses call for much deliberation before being translated. And the professional quality and ability of translators can often be clearly shown by their translation of attributive clause which is a big challenge for translators because of its complex sentence structure, flexible logic relations and obscure relations between its components, thus the translation of attributive clause is an important topic which can’t be underestimated in English-Chinese translation. In brief, a good master of attributive clause translation is conductive not only to the understanding of the contents of the source text, but to the improvement the professional ability of the translators.This paper is based on the author’s translation of several chapters in Mansfield Park written by the famous English writer Jane Austen and is supported by the principle of ’transmigration’of Chung-shu Chien. The translation methods and techniques of restrictive attributive clauses and non-restrictive attributive clauses are discussed respectively in this paper. In the first chapter, it illustrates the background and significance of this research and the research steps of this paper in detail. The second chapter presents a comparison and description between English and Chinese syntactic features in terms of three aspects, making a distinction between English attributive clause and Chinese attributive clause meanwhile. The third chapter analyses the application of "transmigration" in the translation of literary works, based on the theory of "transmigration" of Chung-shu Chien. The fourth chapter mainly elaborates the translation techniques of both restrictive attributive clause and non-restrictive attributive clause in English. And the final chapter briefly summarizes the whole paper and shares the understanding and experience obtained from the translation practice and also points out the deficiencies and areas for improvement of this research.This paper concludes that, the translation of English attributive clause in literary works deserves much more attention. Translators have to retain the original flavor of the literary works, show no trace of rigidity as well. They are required to have a good command of both English and Chinese, be sensitive to words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in both the languages, totally understand the contents of the original text, grasp its writing style and finally do the translation in accordance with the logic relations of sentences. A faithful and smooth translated text will at last be achieved by a flexible choice of translation methods and techniques.