E-C Translation Of Property Brochures From The Perspective Of Foregrounding Theory

This thesis aims to discuss how to represent stylistic features at phonetic,lexical,syntactic and textual levels within the framework of Foregrounding Theory.The discussion is based on the author’s own English-Chinese translation of property brochures.Foregrounding phenomenon in text refers to the stylistics features divergent from linguistic norm,which is also called deviation,variation,highlight or defamiliarization.Applying Foregrounding Theory to E-C translation of property brochures helps the translator see that foregrounding features in language cannot be ignored in the course of translation.This study is composed of six chapters.Chapter One is an introduction which includes method and significance of the present study and the arrangement of the thesis.Chapter Two describes linguistic features in English and Chinese property brochures.Chapter Three renders a brief introduction to Foregrounding Theory.Chapter Four discusses the translation strategies for qualitative foregrounding with specific examples.Chapter Five discusses the translation strategies for quantitative foregrounding with specific examples.The last contains the summary and limitations of the study.It can be found that qualitative foregrounding in property brochures mainly includes compound words and loanwords;special sentence patterns like inverted sentence,rhetorical question,elliptical sentence,imperative sentence and exclamatory sentence;special layout and rhetorical devices like metaphor,personification,quotation and pun,While the quantitative foregrounding includes alliteration,repetition and parallelism.To deal with these foregrounding features,different methods have been adopted in translation,such as borrowing,extension,lexical conversion,splitting,addition,omission and literal translation.This study has found that both Chinese and English property brochures apply specific words,concise expressions and rhetorical devices.However,use of compound words and loanwords,various sentences patterns and diverse rhetorical devices seem a tendency in English property brochures.In the Chinese property brochures people tends to apply idioms and four-character expressions,parallel structure and quotations.Therefore,translating the foregrounding features in the source text one should consider not only the meaning of words and sentences,related professional background-and context,but also the idiomatic expressions of Chinese property brochure.