Skopos-Guided Strategies For English-Chinese Translation Of Long Sentences

This thesis,as a translation report,looks at Modernism and the Ordinary,a book by Liesl Olson,in which she locates ordinary experience at a central position in modernist literature.However,previous studies have mostly focused on the unusual moments brought out against a background of everyday life,and effectively overlooked this dominating ordinariness.Olson proposes that ordinariness should be made an essential feature of modernist literature.In her critique,Olson commands a whole range of long sentences that are common in academic English,characterized mainly by many attributive and adverbial structures,overlapping clauses,and complex logic relations.The complexity of these sentences,and the professionalism with which the book is written,compose a major challenge for the translator in an attempt to produce a target text that is fluent in reading,straight in logic,clear in message,and correct in information.Under the guidance of the skopos theory,the translator analyses what specific help the theory can offer when translating long sentences,and,with case analysis from the Introduction of the book,proposes four strategies that translators can turn to in hours of need:rewriting,division,reversing and metaphrasing.During the project,it becomes obvious that a single technique this report recommends is far from sufficient to cover a translation of a long sentence.A varying combination of methods is usually required to produce a translation that is acceptable and fit for its purpose These techniques,coming from a theory that is purported to be a general framework,is naturally overarching,and cannot be applied to every element in a sentence.Therefore,a translator should not only focus on adjustments of such scales,but also pay attention to the linguistic minutiae that contribute so much to a sentence's meaning.