A Study On The Translation Of “Prepositions” From The Perspective Of Text Typology

The American Petroleum Institute released “API 2015 State of American Energy Report” on its official website in June,2015.This report introduces the U.S.current energy condition from various energy fields as well as forecasts on its future energy development direction.This translation project makes the selection of five parts from this report,including the introduction,oil industry,nuclear energy,hydropower and solar energy.Besides,there are obvious proprietary vocabulary on energy field in the content of this translation project and the overall translation is at the medium degree of difficulty.The study is based on the Text Typology proposed by the German functionalism representative Reiss.She summarizes text types into three categories: informative text,expressive text and operative text.This translation project accordingly belongs to informative text.Translating this sort of text should give emphasis on transferring the content of source language discourse completely and correctly.Under the guidance of this translation theory,the study probes into the prepositional translation methods and their reasons about the translation project.The study process is as follows: First,the author marks the whole prepositional translation methods in the project and then summarizes them into five categories —literal translation,word class conversion,translation of preposition collocation,preposition omission and preposition addition;Second,the author selects some typical sentences from the translation project to exemplify those five prepositional translation methods specifically;Third,through applying the statistical method,the research results are that word class conversion and translation of preposition collocation are highly used in the translation project,literal translation frequently,and preposition omission and preposition addition much less;Finally,the author makes an attempt to probe into the reasons behind different frequencies of these five prepositional translation methods: the number of Chinese prepositions and English ones are in great disparity and English prepositons can flexibly collocate with other parts of speech,which mainly explain the high usage of word class conversion and translation of preposition collocation;Literal translation can only be used when Chinese prepositions and English ones are equivalent in terms of meaning;Based on Reiss' s Text typology,the primary requirement for the translation of informative text is to completely transfer the content of source language discourse,which accordingly reduces the frequencies of preposition omission tranlsation as well as preposition addition one.The summary of those five prepositional translation methods and the analysis of their usage frequencies also enable the author to realize that,it is necessary to have more targeted practice and accumulation for the purpose of getting familiar with prepositional translation methods in similar phrases or sentence structures and improving the translation quality as well as speed.