Techniques Of Translating English Material Process Verbal Groups Into Chinese

This report is based on the translation of Chapter Six of the book A Place for Us written by Fatima Farheen.This book depicts the struggle between tradition and modernity in a five-member Indian American family and the identity problems they face in America,which unfortunately leads to the falling apart of the family.As for its linguistic features,Fatima writes in the most simple and succinct way with highly frequent use of verbal groups,which differs from the typical English writing style.Halliday divides the system of transitivity process types into six,namely,material,mental,relational,behavioral,verbal,and existential(Bustam,2011:3).In Chapter Six,there are lots of material process verbal groups which are hard to translate due to their flexibility and the local culture behind them.As a result,this report will focus on exploring techniques of translating the material process verbal groups in Chapter Six of A Place for Us to help translators do a better job in it.Translating verbal groups,which is the soul of a sentence,a passage and even a book,is a most challenging job considering the complicated local culture behind them.The author should have a clear understanding of different verbal groups and then use corresponding techniques to translate them.As to material process verbal groups,there are altogether five types: pure action,motion,causative,giving and gaining,and alternant.The first four types occur frequently in Chapter Six,which will be analyzed in the following parts of this paper.After finishing the translation task,the author concluded that there are four techniques which can be used to translate material process verbal groups.The technique of omission means omitting certain verbal groups when rendering English into Chinese.Due to the overtness of English and covertness of Chinese,the translator needs to omit the words whose meanings are obvious from the context without violating the principle of faithfulness.Addition,means adding necessary adverbs or adjectives on the basis of accurate comprehension of the original so as to make the translated version correct(Li,2012:147-148).The translator could also employ Ba construction to ensure the readability of the target text and choose proper hyponyms accordingly to achieve lexical equivalence between the source text and the target text.A case study will be carried out to discuss more examples using those techniques to help translators understand and have a better command of them.