On Translating Inanimate-subject Sentences-a Report On The Chinese Translation Of Home (Excerpts)

Home is one of the ten novels written by Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize inLiterature in1993. Readers of this novel are touched by both its profound sense ofmorality and its elegant, clear and refined language. Simple and short as its plot is,Home presents us a tough and resolute black male awakening from his world of chaos.It tells us the story of Frank Money, a24-year-old African-American veteran of theKorean War, and his journey home a year after being discharged from an integratedArmy into a segregated homeland. During the process of saving his sister Cee, Franklearns what it means to be a man, and what it means to come home. Finally, he regainsthe significance of living.Home is a short and swift book, but its narrative approach is still characteristicof Morrison’s: an omniscient perspective and the first person soliloquy alternate andecho with each other. This adds a sense of space and integrity to the story; thefirst-person narration parts are italic typesetting, which makes it epistolary, and thussuccessfully shortens the distance between the author and the readers; the specialexpressions of Black English give more flexibility to the concise original language;the traceless and changing stream of consciousness enables the readers to bettercapture all changes of the character’s thinking.Despite a clear plot and succinct language the book boasts, the whole novel isrich in both writing and linguistic features, among which English sentences withinanimate subjects stand out. The use of inanimate-subject sentences helps add a lotmore flexibility to the language of the book. In addition, it also impresses the readerswith its stream-of-consciousness writing style. Therefore, how to represent such awriting style and linguistic features in the target language poses a great challenge tothe translator.The author has translated the first five chapters of this novel, with13571wordsin total. These chapters mainly tell about what happened to Frank after he managed to escape from the hospital, and about his mental activities. During the process of textanalysis, the author finds that English sentences with inanimate subjects arecommonly seen in the text. Since animate-subject sentences are more often used inChinese texts, the translator finds it hard to achieve appropriate equivalence betweenthe two different languages during the translation process. This report aims to analyzethe types and strategies of translating English sentences with inanimate subjects thatappear in Home into Chinese, and thus to find out appropriate ways to reproduce thewriting style and linguistic features of the original. These sentences mainly include:(a)sentences with the material nouns as the subjects;(b) sentences with nouns thatdescribe physical or mental state or emotion as the subjects;(c) sentences with timeand places as the subjects;(d) sentences with “it” and “there” as the subjects; and (e)sentences with gerunds or the noun forms of verbs as the subjects, etc. The authoroffers correspondent strategies to deal with different types of ESWIS, includingconverting it into a Chinese animate-subject sentence, or converting it into anadverbial clause of reason, condition and manner; or converting it into a non-subjectsentence, etc. Every translation strategy adopted will be analyzed based on realexamples and personal ideas. The author has two major reasons for writing about thistopic: the primary reason is to discuss better ways of translating ESWIS into nativeChinese; the other reason is to arouse more interest from readers in studying andtranslating inanimate-subject sentences in English texts.