A Report On Translation Of Attributive Clauses In "The South China Sea In Focus: Clarifying The Limits Of Maritime Dispute"

This thesis is an E-C translation report.The source text is "The South China Sea in Focus:Clarifying the Limits of Maritime Dispute",a report selected from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.The source text provides abundant information,belonging to typical functional text.During the process of translation,the translator has encountered considerable amounts of attributive clauses.With long and complex sentence structures,attributive clauses have been a great challenge to the translator.Grasping translating methods of attributive clauses is of great importance for translators.Therefore,the translator will discuss the translating methods of attributive clauses in the project.In the project,first,the translator analyzes the translation difficulties in the source text,which are the position,structure and logic of attributive clauses.The usage of English attributive clauses is more flexible than that of Chinese.For example,the attributive clause can be put in the middle of the sentence and at the end of the sentence.If an attributive clause is translated into English in accordance with the structure of the Chinese sentence,it may be awkward.The structure of an attributive clause in English is that the antecedent and subordinate clause are connected by the relative(relative adverb and relative pronoun).However,in Chinese,it is not easy to find such structure in translation.So,if translator wants to adjust the structure of the sentence,she has to analyze the logic of the sentence to avoid mistranslation.Thus,with different attributive clauses,different methods should be employed.In respect of the above-mentioned translation difficulties,the translator will talk about the translation of restrictive attributive clauses and non-restrictive attributive clauses separately through detailed examples.When translating restrictive attributive clauses,the translator will translate short attributive clauses or long attributive clauses that have clauses close to antecedents into pre-modifiers.In terms of long attributive clauses that cannot be translated into pre-modifiers,translator will adopt two methods.First,if the antecedent serves as the subject,translator will translate the antecedent and attributive clause into an independent sentence.Second,if the antecedent serves as the object or predicative,translator will translate main clause and attributive clause into the coordinate clauses.Non-restrictive attributive clauses serve as supplementary information of main clauses.So,they are usually translated into coordinate clauses.In conclusion,the attributive clauses can be translated into three types of sentences.The first one is a pre-modifier,the second one is an independent sentence and the third one is a coordinate clause.With the analysis and summary of translating methods of attributive clauses,the translator has a better understanding of attributive clauses.