Translating Embedded Constituents In Academic Works ——A Report On Translating Queer Theory

In this translation practice,three chapters of Queer Theory:An Introduction authored by Annamarie Jagose,an Australian scholar in queer studies,are translated.When writing an academic work,one aims at developing arguments and clarifying thoughts,making the writing highly logical with frequent use of complicated sentences.As a typical academic work,Queer Theory:An Introduction features a great number of complicated sentences with complex modifiers,multi-layered structure and large amount of information,posing considerable challenges to translation.In this report,the author investigates what constitutes syntactic difficulty and how to translate it.Embedding is the key factor that constitutes syntactic difficulty in translation.For one thing,parsing sentences with embedding structures requires more cognitive effort than those without,bringing difficulty in comprehension.For another,different tolerance of embeddedness and different narrative order between English and Chinese,which is reflected in embedding structures,cause difficulty in conversion process.Difficulty in both comprehension and production makes embedded constituents difficult to translate.According to its definition,embedding has two types,namely phrasal embedding and clausal embedding,whose number,depth and position are related to the syntactic difficulty of a sentence.The embedding difficulty in this report is classified into three types:multiple embeddings,multi-layered embedding and anticipatory constituents（including initial and central embedding）.The sentences to be analyzed usually contains more than one type of embedding difficulty.There are generally two ways to translate embedded structures,namely embedding and cutting.After cutting,four methods can be used for rearrangement:synchronizing,splitting-off,reversing and recasting.The five translation methods of embedding,synchronizing,splitting-off,reversing and recasting have proved to be effective in translating syntactic difficulty in Queer Theory:An Introduction.