A Report On The English-chinese Translation Of Adverbial Clauses In Flag State Responsibility:Historical Development And Contemporary Issues

Complicated sentence structure is a typical feature of the international maritimedocuments.Therefore,how to translate these complicated sentences precisely and clearly is a great challenge for translators.The material used in this paper is excerpted from the book Flag State Responsibility:Historical Development and Contemporary Issues.Based on the translation of twelve thousand words in this book,the author found that the adverbial clause is quite worthy of study for its complex classification and uncertainty in its adverbials.Under the guidance of Nida's(1969)dynamic equivalence theory,this report focuses on the two major issues in this translation practice:the difference between Chinese and English,and the place of adverbial in sentences.Four translation strategies are proposed to address the issues:literal translation strategy used when the two languages share similar syntactic structures;inversion strategy employed when the source text is not consistent with the Chinese idiomaticity;division strategy exploited when the syntactic structure in the source text is lengthy and complex;and combination strategy adopted when the syntactic structure in the source text is short and simple.The report has suggested that these translation strategies may help to achieve equivalence in meaning and style to the source text in English-Chinese translation,thereby providing a reference for the translation of various maritime documents.