Translation Of Long English Sentences In Five Roads To The Future: Power In The Next Global Age

Translation of long English sentences in English-Chinese translation remains a challenging task as well as a key issue.Master-slave relation with many levels of meanings frequently occurs in English sentences because attributive clause,participle phrase or prepositional phrase is always adopted.Based on this fact,more detailed or more complicated contents can be expressed in long English sentences to support a view or narrate an event.And it is official in form and is frequently used in some official paper work,such as reports of government's work,academic paper,social science book or conference presentations.However,when long English sentences are used to express certain contents and logics,translators may have difficulty in the translation which is caused by an ambiguous understanding about the syntax or related cultural background.This translation report does analysis on Five Roads to the Future: Power in the Next Global Age,which is a social science periodical of Politics published by the Penguin Group in 2010.The book is divided into four parts with thirteen chapters introducing us to the birth,the establishment of global dominance,the ending of the “American Century” and predicting the five possibilities of next global age.Long English sentences with simple vocabulary yet intensive logics are frequently used in this book.Under this circumstance,research on the translation of long English sentences is the key topic in this report.This report takes Chapter One and Chapter Two of Five Roads to the Future: Power in the Next Global Age as an example and attempts to analyze how to achieve equivalence in the translation of long English sentences from the perspective of “Functional Equivalence Theory” by Nida,such as equivalence in message,equivalence in artistic concept and equivalence in expression.Besides,some translation methods including division,recasting,annotation,adding dash,omission,amplification,reversing and conversion of parts of speech and translation strategies including linear translation are used in this report.And the author finds that a good understanding about the characteristics and differences between English syntax and Chinese syntax as well as the cultural background is critically important to appropriately and concisely understand the meaning of the source-language context so that the translation context could break the sentence structure of the long English sentences and achieve “the most natural and closest” equivalence to the source-language context.This report aims to provide some guidance and help for other translators when it comes to the similar translation of long English sentences in social science book.