A Report On The Chinese Translation Of Operate And Its Derivatives In Grounding Accident Reports

With the development of national shipping industry and the exchanges of the shipping information between different countries, English, as the most commonly used language in the world, plays a more and more vital part in marine exchanges. In addition, English marine investigation reports are of great importance to study current marine situation and development. In the marine investigation reports, there exist derivatives with a very high frequency, which should be paid more attention to. This report, taking operate as an example, deals with the translation strategies of operate and its derivatives in marine investigation reports.Derivation is a very important kind of word-formation. Derivational suffix is a grammatical phenomenon, which forms the words with the same or similar meanings with different parts of speech. Derivational suffix in the English texts enlightens the translation of the texts. By using Antconc to analyze the frequency of words, it is found that the derivatives of operate are presented with a high frequency. Out of the 224 foreign investigation reports, there are 3038 operate and its derivatives in total. To be specific, they are operating, operated, operation, operator, operational, operative, operable, operationally. They function variously and the translation strategies applied are also distinct.Based on the theory of formation of morpheme in linguistics and the translation shift theory of Catford, taking operate as an example, extension can be made to the study and translation of derivation in the whole English marine texts. By the study of the translation of derivatives as well as using such strategies as syntactic linearity translation, amplification and translation of one word with different meanings, we can have a better understanding of translation of derivatives in marine accident reports and make contributions to future study.