An Analysis Of Nominalization In English Translations Of Chinese Prose

Nominalization is a distinctive feature of written English. Nominalization, defined by Halliday, is any element or group of elements which can function as a noun or noun phrase in a clause. In Western countries, linguists from some major linguistic schools have accounted for this phenomenon from different approaches. In China, nominalization has also aroused many researchers’concern in recent three decades. What deserves a special attention is that nominalization is treated as one of the important subjects in the contrastive study of English and Chinese booming in China in recent three decades. Lian Shuneng,professor of Xiamen University, on the basis of the previous researches of some Chinese and foreign scholars like Zhao Yuanren, Wangli, Lu Shuxiang, O.Jesperson, H.W.Fowler, R. Quirk, published his academic monograph Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese, in which there’re three chapters-impersonal subject vs personal subject, static vs dynamic, abstract vs concrete-involving nominalization. This thesis first makes a detailed statistical analysis of the nominalizations in the corpus of Selected Prose of Chen Zhongshi, and draws a conclusion that the average distribution frequency of nominalizations in the 20 essays of Selected Prose of Chen Zhongshi is 25.9%,and such high distribution frequency is enough to demonstrate the frequent application of nominalization in the corpus. Next, this thesis analyzeis,with a large number of typical examples involving nominalization from the fresh corpus of Selected Prose of Chen Zhongshi, how the esthetic effects of compactness, conciseness, humor, objectivity, elegance, and sound are achieved by means of nominalization during the process of Chinese-English prose translation. The analysis is made from the three perspectives of impersonal subject vs personal subject, static vs dynamic, abstract vs concrete. Through the above analysis, the author attempts to make a valuable contribution to the solution of the most important and the most difficult problem in the practice of Chinese-English prose translation-to convey esthetic feeling in the translation.. Besides, the author expects to help translation beginners to develop a strong awareness of the importance of nominalization in modern English, to be able to appreciate the beauty of English prose writing, and to be able to convey and even create such beauty by means of nominalization in the practice of Chinese-English prose translation.