Syntactic Restructuring In E-C Academic Translation

Text typology theory advocates that different translation strategies can be adopted to translate texts of different types.A common strategy for doing English to Chinese translation is syntactic restructuring.This paper aims to discuss the application of syntactic restructuring in E-C academic translation.Under the guidance of Katharina Reiss’ s text typology theory,the author analyzes the text type and sentence features of the source text after reviewing the differences of word order between English and Chinese.After the analysis of the specific syntactic features of academic text,the translation approach of restructuring word order is proposed and testified with examples of two categories of inanimate subjects and postmodifiers taken from the source text.After the analysis,the author concludes that restructuring can be applied to the translation of academic texts.Sentences with inanimate subjects can be translated into the “You” structure in Chinese.And if the subject is “it”,the translator should consider whether “it” is used as an antecedent or an emphatic word,before translating the sentence by reversing its former and latter part or by translating it into the “Shi”structure in Chinese.When translating the postmodifier,the translator should consider its function.If the postmodifier is used to modify the head noun,it can be translated into Chinese attributive.If it plays a supplementary role,it can be translated into several short Chinese sentences.