A Study On The E-C Translation Strategies Of Prepositional Phrases In English For Science And Technology

With the continuous development of our national defense,China has an increasing demand on foreign military materials and meanwhile has also put forward higher requirements for the quality of translation in this field.Compared with other types of text,the text of English for Science and Technology(EST)is characterized by the use of a large number of prepositional phrases.It is simple in structure but rich in meanings,which to some extent makes it more difficult for translators to translate the text smoothly.To deal with this problem,this paper takes prepositional phrases as research subjects and tries to summarize the E-C translation strategies on the text of EST with the first three chapters of The U.S.Army Field Manual5-250 as an example.Based on the translation practice to the source text,the author marks out the prepositional phrases of the text first,then describes its shifts in the process of E-C translation and finally summarizes the translation strategies of prepositional phrases from the perspective of Catford’s Translation Category Shifts into two categories: 1)the strategy of class shifts,which can be further divided into following methods.When the prepositional phrases as predicative or adverbials carry a dynamic meaning they can be shifted into Chinese verb phrases;When the prepositional phrases as attributives carry a static meaning,they can be shifted into Chinese adjectives.2)the strategy of unit shifts,which can be further divided into following methods.When the prepositional phrases as attributives or adverbials have a long structure,they can be upgraded into the scale of Chinese sentence;When the prepositional phrases as objective complements have a short structure,they can be degraded into the scale of Chinese word;For the prepositional phrases with similar structure,logic and word order to Chinese,they can remain to be the scale of Chinese phrases after translation shift.To sum up,the translator can choose different translation methods according to grammatical function,structure length and language feature of the prepositional phrases.