On E-C Translation Of Abstract Nouns Of Action From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

In modern English,abstract nouns are widely used to describe the invisible world of notions,which is a major characteristic of English.Among all,abstract nouns of action are special.This kind of nouns comes from verb nominalization and their meanings are abstract because of compression.The studies on the translation of such nouns are not systematic and lack theoretical foundation.This thesis builds a parallel corpus with the data collected from Pride and Prejudice and Sun Zhili's Chinese version for a systematic analysis of E-C translation of abstract nouns of action with reference to the factors that influence the choices from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.There are two methods of translating abstract nouns of action:extension and implicitation.Extension extends the boundary of meaning in that the meaning of the target text is more subjective and the content is more unbounded than that of the source.There are four methods of extending abstract nouns of actions:first,removing the grammatical markers of the abstract nouns of action;second,explicating the implied meaning;third,adding subjective modifiers or rhetoric;fourth,backward-processing,namely rearranging the sentence logic by retrieving to the process phase rather than the result phase of an event to conform to the subjectivity orientation and temporal sequence of Chinese language.English nouns of action often contain the meaning of result,contradicting the pragmatic principle that Chinese is a process-oriented language.The thesis puts forward the translation method to retrieve to the process of the abstract nouns of action so that the translation may be more acceptable to the Chinese audience.Implicitation is to imply the meanings of the original words in the context.Partially concrete abstract nouns of action and non-concrete abstract nouns of action are mainly extended by marker removing and concrete abstract nouns of action,by explicitation.Sun Zhili,a distinguished translator and a native speaker of Chinese,makes choices to adapt to the target language from macro level to micro level.In translation,he prefers verbs,personal subjects,reduplicated words,four-character structures and parallel structures to those that are relatively semantically or pragmatically bounded under the influence of his thinking mode,aesthetic views and pragmatic principle during dynamic adaptations.This thesis offers a theoretical and practical reference for English-Chinese translation with the study of translating Chinese abstract nouns of action into English.