Areport On The E-C Translation Strategies For Attributes In The Three Cutters (Chapter 1-5)

Attributes are often used to delimit the condition of environment or to describe the personality of characters.They hold the key to portraying personalities and plots.Yet,the complexity of position relationships and semantic functions in English and Chinese has created obstacles for translators to understand and interpret passages.The attributes translation thus has become a hot button for translation.The previous studies of attributive translation concentrated on the attributive clauses instead of other types of attributes.Taking the E-C translation of The Three Cutters written by Marryat Frederick as an example,this report has rather focused on the translation of attributes aiming to provide some suggestions for the attributive translation in the future.Attributes have been classified according to their semantic functions and then explored translation strategies for attributes in The Three Cutters.It has classified attributes according to positions and semantic relationships between attributes and head nouns.First of all,the attributes have been divided into groups according to positions of attributes and head nouns.They can fall into two categories,including “pre-attributes”and “post-attributes”.Then,this thesis probes semantic functions of pre-attributes and post-attributes by giving examples to demonstrate the root of attributive classification in the hope of providing some innovative perspectives or methods to the translation of attributes.Semantic functions of attributes can accommodate classifying function of pre-attributes,describing function of pre-attributes,classifying functionof post-attributes,describing function of post-attributes,adverbial function of post-attributes,and dynamic function of post-attributes.Through the process of classification,this thesis has found that translators may adopt different translation strategies for various attributes based on their different semantic functions.It has applied “fronting”,“inversion”,“conversion” translation strategies to accurately transfer English information of attributes into Chinese.After this translation project,this thesis has drawn a conclusion that “fronting” strategy is often used to classifying attributes,“inversion” to describing attributes and“conversion” to “adverbial and dynamic attributes”.