A Report On The Application Of Word Class Conversion Into E-C Translation Of Legal Texts

This article is a translation report on air quality rules and regulations.And the original translation material is excerpted from the AIR QUALITY AN D RU LES AN D REGULATIONS of the Philippines.The translator undertook this task when practicing in a company.It concerns a lot to the development of the company and its shareholders' interests.In terms of grammar and usage,there is huge difference between the English and Chinese.For an instance,nouns and noun phrases are more frequently used in English;while verbs and verb structures prevail in C hinese.This obvious difference in language system between source language and target language gives birth to the word class conversion,which refers to the conversion between the source and target languages on word class.?Word Conversion? belongs to the coverage of category conversion put up with by Catford,and is originally defined as ?Departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the SL to TL.? When formal correspondence and textual equivalence can't be achieved at the same time,the conversion is inevitable.Actually,it is a common and practical strategy to deal with such language differences in translation practice.Since,word class conversion adds semantic items to a certain word,provid ing more semantic choices and making the degree of pragmatic flexibility of certain word higher.Therefore,the translator enjoys much more freedom in encoding,and is able to make stiff,awkward,and C hinglish statement smooth,fluent and natural.Thus,t he translator in the translation process adopts Catford's translation conversion theory,Nida's functional equivalence theory and Vermeer's skopos theory,and focuses on word conversion level,such as conversion of adjectives and prepositions into verbs,conversion of adverbs into adjectives,conversion of pronouns into nouns,and respective ly provides specific examples of word class conversion,trying to make the translation faithful to the original text and make it much more appealing to the reading habits of target readers.This translation report consists of five parts: the first part states the necessity of knowing the foreign laws amid the economic globalization;the second part briefly introduce this translation task;the third part describes the tra nslation process;the fourth part is about case analysis of word class conversion;the last part ends this paper with a summary for this translation practice.This report mainly focuses on word class conversion in legal documents translation and states the ir application with relevant examples,expecting that people get to know word class conversion,for it is not just a language phenomenon,but also a simplified and concise way of thinking.The translator hopes this report can offer other translators certain references in dealing with similar translation conversion phenomenon in future.