Translation Methods For Attributive Clauses In Civil Law In The Qing And Republican China

This is a translation report involving the translation of Chapter IV and Chapter V of Civil Law in the Qing and Republican China,which is a typical legal academic book introducing the Chinese civil legal system in the Qing Dynasty and the Republican period.The authors of the book have analyzed the relationship between the state and the civil society reflected in civil law and discussed the research methods of Chinese legal history and social history.The author of the report has encountered a large amount of attributive clauses that are difficult to understand and translate.An attributive clause is a clause functioning as an attributive to modify or restrict a noun or an antecedent after a pronoun in a complex sentence and is usually led by relative pronouns or relative adverbs.English focuses on hypotaxiswhile Chinese focuses on parataxis,there is no equivalent syntactic form to attributive clause in Chinese.The complex structure of the attributive clause has also brought great difficulties to the effective translation of English attributive clause.In order to solve difficulties that encountered during the translation practice,the author of the report summarizes and studies the attributive clauses.The report selects several typical attributive clauses in the source text and analyzes the meaning and concludes four translation methods of English attributive clauses: front-loading translation,blending,division and adverbial translation.The author hopes to offer some references for translation of English attributive clauses in legal academic texts.