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

This report is based on the translation of the first three chapters of Part Three in Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices,with a total word count of 15,964.This book falls into the category of informative text,detailedly introducing the challenges encountered in the evaluation process,the present circumstance of online teaching and the possible methods applied in the evaluation.Nowadays,due to the severe spread of the COVID-19,online teaching becomes the major method for schools to conduct their regular teaching.Therefore,the evaluation of online courses attaches great importance to the quality of online education.During the translation,the frequent use of the attributive clauses in the source text becomes one of the greatest barriers.The major difficulties are as followed: the uncertain position of the attributive clauses in the target text,the translation of the long attributive clauses and the treatment of logical relationship between the main clause and the attributive clauses.In order to solve the above translation difficulties,this report is conducted on the basis of the former studies focusing on the translation of attributive clauses.This report divides the attributive clauses into three categories: restrictive attributive clauses,non-restrictive attributive clauses and attributive clauses with adverbial function.On the base of the translation of 137 attributive clauses in the source text,the author concludes that different attributive clauses should be applied different translation methods depending on their length and logical relations with the main clauses.As for the restrictive attributive clauses,it is usually better to apply the pre-position method by translating it as“......?”in Chinese so as to conform to the reading habits of Chinese people.Besides,when the main clause is comparatively simple while the restrictive attributive clause more complicate,the combination method is more advisable to achieve the integration and coherence in the target text.For the reason of nested clauses or various sentence elements embedded in the restrictive attributive clause,translating it as pre-modifier will easily give rise to the comprehension difficulty,so applying the post-position method will be a wise option to produce a more readable and comprehensible text.As for non-restrictive attributive clauses which have weak relations with the main clause,post-position method is preferable to the Chinese writing habits.With regard to the attributive clauses of causality,condition and purpose,the transformation or division is preferable so thatthe translation can be flexible in line with the logic orders of Chinese expression like cause-effect,condition-effect and means-end.