On The Translation Of Verbal Nominalizations In Life Science English Literature From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Scientific texts in English are characterized by clarity,accuracy,conciseness and rigorousness.Life science literature involves a comprehensive aggregate of diversified disciplines and inter-disciplines,such as chemistry,bio-chemistry,biology,physics,etc,highlighting the scientific nature,as well as social and humanity nature,in as often witnessed in life science English discourse.English used in life science manifests the typical linguistic and stylistic features of scientific English,which are mainly abundant use of verbal nominalizations,loaned terminology,involved sentences,passive structures,non-finite verbs,etc.Among them,verbal nominalization is one of the most typical features.The phenomena,facts,and processes which are often described with verbs in common English are often expressed with verbal nouns or noun phrases in English,and the structure of "nouns converted from verbs or nouns reflecting actions + prep.+ noun(noun phrases)"has become a prominent form of nominalization in scientific English.Due to the differences in phonetic,lexical,and semantic structures,syntax,thinking patterns,as well as culture between English and Chinese,the full equivalence in the translation of English as used in life science literature into Chinese is hard to achieve.Verbal expressions are preferred in the Chinese scientific literature,while nominalizations usually involving nouns converted from verbs used with prepositions followed by nouns are preferred in English scientific literature.In E-C translation,such a surface structure difference is expected to be minimized,and the original meaning with its scientific word power is expected to be represented in the target language from the functional-equivalence translation theory."Nouns converted from verbs or nouns reflecting actions + prep.+ noun(noun phrases)" structure comprises the head noun(noun converted from verbs),plus attributive made up of preposition followed by noun phrases.On the surface,the noun phrase in this structure is used as attribute modifying the verbal nouns,but on the further exploration,the noun phrase in the front position and the verbal nouns in the posterior position in "nouns converted from verbs or nouns reflecting actions + prep.+ noun(noun phrases)" structure involve various semantic or logical relations.Based on the Chinese translation of An Update on the Epidemiology and Pathology of African Swine Fever and the functional equivalence theory,the present thesis discussed the semantic or logical relations of subject-predicate,verb-object and modified-modifier as contained in the structure of "nouns converted from verbs or nouns reflecting actions + prep.+ noun(noun phrases)" and the methods of treating them properly in the E-C translation.