On The Selection Of Subjects In Chinese-English Translation As Exemplified By Medical Thesis Translation

The selection of subject is of great challenge in Chinese-to-English(C-E)translation,as there are many differences between these two languages in terms of syntactical and lexical features.Chinese is a topic-prominent language with dispensable subjects,whereas English,a subject-prominent hypotaxis language with a typical subject-verb(SV)structure.Particular attention should be paid to subject selection in translating Chinese medical theses,in which subjects are always missing or cannot be kept directly in C-E translation.Therefore,the thesis aims to investigate the selection of subjects in medical thesis C-E translation.With the medical theses and the corresponding translations as the research object,the author classifies the sentences according to the usage of subjects,and then accordingly proposes several feasible translation strategies on the basis of the existing comparative studies of English and Chinese.The research shows that sentences in Chinese medical theses can be classified into three groups as far as subjects are concerned,that is,sentences with“right”subjects,sentences with“wrong”subjects and those without subjects.When translating sentences with subjects,translators are supposed to select original ones,select other constituents of the original sentences or adopt the“there be”structure.For the translation of sentences without subjects,it is advisable that translators supplement suitable subjects,adopt passive voice or imperative sentence structure in order to properly reproduce the meaning of original texts.