On The Language Features And Chinese Translation Of English Book Contents

As the medium of cultural communication, books have been translated and studied for a long time. However, contents, the essential part of a book, did not receive much attention, and its translation studies can be numbered. There exists a special subject named bibliography, which studies contents as an independent discipline. Although it mainly studies the arrangement, categorization and retrieval of booklists and documents, without touching the aspects of language and translation, the very existence and development of bibliography proved that book contents have certain value of research. Though the expressions used in contents are usually quite simple, they also have their own features and regularities. Analyzing the language features of contents will not only help translation practice, but also help people to pay attention to and get to know more about book contents. Therefore, the writer tries to start with English book contents and conduct a discussion on its language features and Chinese translation. This paper starts with a brief introduction of the definition and structure of book contents, then discusses the importance of book contents both from the perspective of writers and readers. Next, studies are made on the English book contents to analyze their language features at the three levels of word, phrase and sentence, such as the frequent use of nouns and preposition, the tendency of nominalization and interrogative sentence and etc.. Last, by refering to the language features of English book contents and its demand of conciseness, stuides are made on the regularities of translating English book contents into Chinese through translation practice so as to find the appropriate way of translation and to provide reference for future translation.