The Usages Of The English Definite Article And Their Translation Strategies

English articles are among the words that we encounter at the onset of English learning. However, it is hard to completely master the usages of articles even for advanced learners. As function words, the articles may seem easy to learn, yet their usages are very complex and sometimes an incorrect understanding of articles could lead to the deviation of the meaning of a whole sentence.The definite article the, serving as one of the English articles, is the most frequently used word according to the word frequency statistics provided by COBUILD corpus. Due to the difference between the Chinese language and the English language, no equivalence of the can be found in Chinese. Therefore, Chinese learners often have problems in finding an exact equivalence of the definite article when translating it into Chinese. Sometimes, they simply translate it into Chinese demonstratives "这/那"(or "这些/那些") and sometimes they adopt the method of omission. But the usage of the involves "semantic concepts which have a relation with existence and reference and text concepts which have a relation with anaphora and situation"(Zhou Baoguo,2008, p1), and the translation of it is not a mechanical equivalence or omission; it needs the consideration of many factors.The present study classifies the usages of the into three kinds, that is specific reference, generic reference and collation, and then discusses their translation strategies accordingly to clearly point out when the translation strategy of equivalence can be used and when the translation strategy of omission can be used as well as when to apply other translation methods to achieve the best results.