A Report On The Translation Of Postpositive Attributives In Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices (Excerpts)

With the desirable growth of information and Internet technologies,online teaching as a new education form is quickly emerging.Translating the texts about online teaching and drawing on the successful experience from foreign universities are of paramount significance to promote the development of online teaching in China.In the context of the novel coronavirus outbreak,it is particularly important for the implementation of MOE's “Home Study” Initiative.This report derives from the translation of an excerpt from the book Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices,which mainly introduces the contexts and challenges of current evaluation of online teaching,evaluation categories,and different evaluation methods and tools.It is an informative text aiming at conveying the information of education evaluation.The text involves a large number of educational terminologies,preposition structures,compound sentences,and complex sentences with various complex postpositive attributives,which comprise the most demanding parts in the process of translation.So on the basis of the translator's personal translation experience,the report mainly discusses the translation of English postpositive attributives in terms of contrastive study of differences between English and Chinese.According to the different forms of postpositive attributives,the sentences in the source text are classified into three categories: 1)sentences with the prepositional phrase as postpositive attributive;2)sentences with the non-predicate verb as postpositive attributive and;3)sentences with the attributive clause as postpositive attributive.For the first category,in contrast with frequent use of preposition in English,Chinese language has fewer prepositions as well as no post attributives,so it is essential to translate those prepositional phrases into pre-modifiers or adverbial modifiers,which not only conforms to the Chinese expression habits but also accurately conveys the meaning of source text.As for the second one,in terms of the syntactic functions of non-predicate verbs(i.e.present participle is progressive and active;past participle is completed and passive;infinitive is action in future or purpose.),translation methods like division and inversion are applied to achieve Chinese syntactic features such as prominent parataxis,successive use of verbs and reversed linear expansion.To deal with the last category,it is common to restructure the original clauses into new ones or just split the long sentences intoshort ones in line with the characteristics of more short and loose sentences in Chinese.