A Report On Translation Of Attributive Clauses In Maritime Texts

An attributive clause lies behind a noun or the main clause it modifies while most attributes in Chinese precede the noun. The difference in sentence structure and function between attributive clauses and attributes in Chinese makes it harder to translate attributive clauses from English to Chinese. The present thesis, based on my translation of maritime materials:"MO and the protection of the marine environment" and "IMO: one hundred years after the Titanic", and guided by Nida’s functional equivalence theory, explores the strategies and methods in translation of attributive clauses in maritime text into Chinese. The methods to be applied include combination, division, the method of shifting into adverbial and methods to deal with exceptions, which aims to draw insight into the translation of attributive clauses in maritime texts. Combination can be divided into the method of translating into the Chinese sentence structure with a de in it, the method of translating into bi-constituent construction and the method of translating into serial verb structure in Chinese. Division can be divided into the method of translating into coordinate structure in Chinese, the method of translating into another complete sentence in Chinese; Methods to deal with exceptions can be divided into the following three cases:there are two attributive clauses in one sentence; attributive clauses connected by "as"; omission of attributive clauses in translation. While translating, the author finds that the length of attributive clauses and the relation between antecedents and attributive clauses have direct influence on translation methods. Therefore, when translating attributive clauses from English to Chinese, we should first analyze the deep structure of the sentence, fully understanding the logical relation between sentence elements and then reproduce in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message so as to ensure that readers of target language will be able to understand and appreciate the message the same as source language readers did.