Report On E-C Translation Of Cover Stories From TIME: Difficulties And Strategies Of Translating Attributive Clauses

This report is a summary of the project of E-C translation of two cover stories from TIME with a special focus on the difficulties and strategies of translating attributive clauses. It is aimed at improving the author’s translating competence.One of the stories is related to Janet Yellen, the Fed Chief and the other is concerned with Hillary Clinton. There are a lot of attributive clauses in the articles, some of which are great challenges to the translator because Chinese is parataxis while English is hypotaxis. The first challenge is that some attributive clauses are too long and totally different from Chinese sentences and should be adjusted in translation; the second is that some attributive clauses are logically complicated with implications of object, reason, purpose, concession and so on. So the translator should analyze the relationship between an attributive clause and the main sentence in the comprehension stage and translate it into a corresponding clause in the target language.According to Nida’s functional equivalence theory, translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style. Therefore, the translator finds out some methods to solve the above difficulties. As to long attributive clauses, the author utilizes the translating methods of blending and dividing. Regarding logically complicated attributive clauses, the author translates them into object clauses and adverbial clauses such as adverbial clauses of object, reason, purpose, result, manner and concession.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory, the translator has successfully completed the E-C translation project. It not only improves the author’s translation skills, but also hopefully provides empirical data of translating attributive clauses.