A Report On The E-C Translation Of Postmodifiers Of Nouns In Exxon Mobil’s 2020 Annual Report

Annual report is an annual financial statement that listed companies must submit to their shareholders,which serves as an important way for investors to know about the company’s business conditions and make an investment decision.This translation practice is excerpted from 2020 Annual Report of Exxon Mobil Corporation,which reflects Exxon’s business conditions,risk factors,assets,and etc.As a typical commercial text,the annual report has the characteristics of formality and rigorousness in its structure and content.In this process of translation,the postmodifiers of nouns in the original text appear frequently and have various and complex structures,including prepositional phrases,attributive clauses,non-finite verb phrases,multiple postmodification,etc.These postmodifiers play the role of modifying nouns or supplementing the information about nouns,conveying important business information,and some of them also form complex logical relations with the determiner.It is the focus of this paper to accurately translate these postmodifiers and represent the relevant information of Exxon Mobil.Under the guidance of Chesterman’s three models of translation ethics,translation methods and techniques including division,inversion,conversion,synthesis are adopted to tackle such translation problems by analyzing the functions of postmodifiers of nouns,the relation between head and its postmodifiers,and the logic relations between multiple postmodifiers.And it is hoped that this paper will provide some reference for the translation of business texts and the study of postmodifiers of nouns.