Translation Strategies For Nominalization In English Academic Texts

Nominalization is an essential constituent of grammatical metaphor and a common phenomenon in English written texts.The research perspective of nominalization has experienced a transformation from morphological,syntactic,and semantic analyses to cognitive and functional approaches.In recent years,more and more scholars have paid attention to the application of nominalization in different texts.However,their insights are heavily focused on the translation of nominalization in scientific texts.Relatively few scholars probe into academic texts.Accordingly,this thesis aims to explore the translation of nominalization in English academic texts.By means of examining Chomsky's academic monograph Language and Mind from the perspective of grammatical metaphor,this thesis reveals that nominalization is frequently employed in English academic texts and it boasts many distinctive characteristics and functions.At the clausal level,nominalization can encapsulate a large amount of information in academic texts and increase lexical density.At the textual level,it can serve as a cohesive tie and realize thematic progression.At the stylistic level,nominalization can enhance objectivity and abstractness and it conforms to the needs of the formal style.Ultimately,this thesis is fundamentally grounded by grammatical metaphor in SFL.By analyzing three translated versions of Language and Mind,it identifies that there exist some mistranslations as well as inaccurate and inconsistent translations of nominalized terms.Meanwhile,this thesis aims to explore specific translation strategies of nominalization in English academic texts:omission,keeping nominalization,and unpacking nominalization.Nominalization can establish a pattern of cohesion as "R1-T2" which condenses the information of rheme in the previous sentence and serves as given information of theme in the next sentence.In this case,the method of omission can be adopted to realize coherence and avoid redundancy without causing loss of meaning.Chinese academic texts also need to convey meaning of some concepts by utilizing abstract nouns,so keeping nominalization in the target text can strengthen abstractness as well as render the form and meaning highly consistent with the source text.Furthermore,unpacking nominalization is manifested in three aspects:categorical shifts,adding information,and upranking of nominalized structures.Categorical shifts often involve shifts from nouns to verbs or adjectives and unpacking nominalization to verbs can highlight the initiative of participants.In the nominalizing process,sometimes participants and circumstantial elements are concealed in the text due to grammatical metaphorization.Consequently,it is necessary to supplement these elements when we unpack nominalized structures,which might inevitably result in the upranking of nominalized structures.Unpacking nominalization conforms to the linguistic features of Chinese and it is a change from static to dynamic process and from abstract to concrete reference.These strategies complement each other and carry implications for the translation of nominalization in English academic texts.