A Practice Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of Subjectless Sentences In Ship Emergency Contingency Plan

The text of this translation practice report is the Safety Management System Document of a shipping company in Dalian.The document is entitled "Ship Emergency Contingency Plan".The aims of the English version are to provide the Company's employees,especially people working on-board with the operation specifications of all types of operations and to cope with internal and external audits.The Ship Emergency Contingency Plan is subject to a maritime text.The text has distinct linguistic features,including mainly using short and concise sentences,starting sentence's with verbs expressing orders and utilizing formal and serious expressions.Meanwhile,it also shows the apparent Chinese grammatical features,i.e.lacking subjects and sentence cohesion,and relying on the semantics of vocabularies to express meanings and emotions.That leads to the existence of a large number of subjectless sentences in the text.Subjectless sentences can be classified into two groups,one of which is ellipsis sentences,omitting subjects that have been mentioned in the previous text.In this case,subjects can be inferred from the context or the common sense.As for another type of subjectless sentences,the subjects can hardly be found literally,and it is difficult to identify the subjects considering the context.Referring to other scholars,the report categorizes subjectless sentences into relative subjectless sentences and absolute subjectless sentences in accordance with the searchability and concealment of the subject.Chinese and English have huge differences in ways of thinking and syntactic structure.Apart from imperative sentences,there are no equivalent sentence structures in English.Therefore,this report will focus on the translation of Chinese subjectless sentences and strive to translate them accurately.25 examples are enumerated in the report with the techniques of subject selection in Chinese-English translation discussed.To cope with.relative subjectless sentences,two strategies-"amplification of subject" and "using imperative sentences"-are adopted.In addition,four strategies for translating absolute subjectless sentences are as follows:"using passive voice","transferring subjectless part into subject",applying "There be" sentence pattern and using formal subject "It".