The Strategies For Translating Verbs In Maritime Accident Reports

The main purpose of writing maritime accident reports as the first-hand comprehensive material is to sort out the reasons of the accidents in order to take prevention measures and to distribute economic liability. And IMO has regulated that contracting states have the obligation to conduct maritime investigation and required them to submit the conclusions made and lessons taken from the maritime accidents. Only by making the fact in the accident reports public can the authorities concerned all over the world learn lessons from the incident and improve their methods to deal with it, thus to reduce the possibility of marine accidents. So it is very important to translate the Chinese accident reports into English in order to submit to international organizations and report the major accidents in time. Because of the big difference between English and Chinese, firstly, most of the maritime investigators write the maritime accident reports in Chinese, and then translate them into English. The reports translated are sometimes not precise versions. Therefore it’s very important to translate maritime accident reports in a more standard way.This article firstly analyzes the general features of maritime accident reports in structures, context, vocabulary and sentences. Then it compares the Chinese accident reports with the English ones. There is a great difference between English and Chinese which is that a few verbs can be included in one Chinese sentence while only one verb can be accommodated in an English sentence with complicated forms, so that the rest verbs have to be transformed to other parts of speech. This article mainly deals with the translation of verbs. Now that verbs show a very high frequency in Chinese accident reports which constitute the main body, the accurate description of the accident process is essential for the authorities concerned to analyze and summarize. Taking reports on the investigation of grounding as an example, it studies the translation strategies of the verbs in the reports with the method of conversion.