On Translating English Attributive Clauses In Scientific Texts

New Media: A Critical Introduction(Second Edition), published by Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Kieran Kelly and Iain Grant in 2008, is one of the best and by far the most comprehensive textbooks available on media industry. The book provides a wealth of material and elaboration to create an overview of new trends emerging from new media from technological, cultural, political and economic perspectives. It serves as a valuable reference for those who aspire to be engaged in media industry. The translator deems it meaningful to translate and introduce this book to Chinese readers so that they can have a better understanding of new media.The source text uses scientific and technological style of writing, and is characterized by the tendency of nominalization, extensive uses of technical terms, passive voice, and postpositional attributes. The translation material is an excerpt from Chapter 1. In this part, a lot of attributive clauses are applied to illustrate the characteristics of new media, which is one of the most distinctive features of scientific texts. Hence, the translator chose this part as translation material. As attributive clauses are major obstacles throughout the translating practice due to its complexity and variety, this report focuses on translation strategies of English attributive clauses.First of all, the report presents the stylistic features of scientific texts and general principles of scientific texts translation, and gives a brief introduction to the English attributive clause, including its function and classification. On this basis, the report attempts to elaborate several translation strategies of English attributive clauses in scientific texts with typical examples, namely merging, splitting, and restructuring.Through the translation practice, the translator realizes that it is of vital importance to break free from the original structure on the basis of accurate comprehension to produce a smooth and natural translation that conforms to Chinese usage. The report intends to improve the translator’s skills, and to provide reference for other translators when dealing with texts of similar type.