E-C Translation Of Long And Complex Sentences From The Perspective Of Back-transformation Theory

By taking the book A Social History of England,1200-1500(Excerpts)and its corresponding translation as the research object,this thesis aims to discuss the translation techniques of long and complex sentences under the guidance of Eugene Nida's Back-transformation theory.Just as the name implies,English long and complex sentences are long sentences with complicated structures.With diverse modifiers,varied constituent relationships and complicated sentence structures,they often make it difficult for translators to identify the principal parts of the original sentences and to understand them clearly,which bring great difficulties to E-C translation practice.A Social History of England1200-1500(Excerpts)is a book about British social history in medieval ages.Long and complex sentences with many parallel structures and clauses are frequently used in this book.Back-transformation theory consists of three steps,namely,analysis,transfer and restructuring.Analysis refers to the analysis of the grammatical structures and semantic relationships of a sentence and then to figure out the kernel sentences.Transfer emphasizes the understanding of the kernel sentences and then to convey the information of the source text accurately.Restructuring focuses on reorganizing the text according to the syntactic habits of Chinese.Back-transformation theory explains the basic steps of translation clearly.On this basis,when translating long and complex sentences,the author first analyzes the core information of long and complex sentencesand figures out kernel sentences.Then the author transforms the kernel sentences into the deep structure of the target language.Finally the author reorganizes the information according to Chinese way of expression.Based on this,the author selected four translation techniques,namely,sequencing,reversing,embedding and division.If the sequence of actions described in some English long sentences is arranged according to the time sequence or the logical relationships,which is more consistent with that expressed in Chinese sentences,then the author adopts the technique of sequencing.In some long and complex sentences,if the order of expression is different from that of Chinese,then the original information can be inverted.If there are post modifiers in a long and complex sentence,then the author put them before the head word.If the relationship between the main parts and subordinate clauses is not so close,then the phrases are transformed into sentences according to the syntactic habits of Chinese which tends to use short sentences.