A Report On The Translation Of Inanimate-Subject Sentences

Spark: The Life of Electricity and The Electricity of Life is a popular science work published by the Princeton University Press in 2021,which consists of 16 chapters.The translated text is excerpted from Chapters 13 and 14,with a total number of 18,130 words.As a popular science,the selected chapters are characterized with the precise words and scientific expressions.Out of a total of 903 sentences in the selected text,162 of them are inanimate-subject sentences,accounting for18 percent,which sets the foundation to explore the translation strategies of inanimate-subject sentences.Previous classification of the inanimate-subject sentence was mainly based on the subject-predicate collocation from the perspective of animate feature and the subject types,but the grammatical metaphor with the feature of nominalization also reflects the characteristics of inanimate-subject sentences.Nominalization means using verbs or adjectives to represent entities,processes and attributes,which refines and enriches the categories of inanimate-subject sentences.The translator classifies the inanimate-subject sentences in the selected chapters into two categories:structural inanimate-subject sentences with the inanimate neutral-subject sentence,the inanimate recipient-subject sentence and inanimate formal-subject sentence as its subtypes,and metaphorical inanimate-subject sentences,consist of the inanimate-subject sentence from conceptual metaphor and the inanimate-subject sentence from grammatical metaphor.Based on the above classification,the translator,from a contrastive perspective,focuses on subject level and sentence level,and the potential reasons for those tendency summarized in the angle of cultural thought pattern between English and Chinese to see the translation strategies of inanimate-subject sentences.The report shows that retaining the inanimate subject,converting inanimate subjects into other sentence components and transferring English inanimate-subject sentences into Chinese animate-subject sentences and non-subject sentences are revealed in the translation of inanimate-subject sentences.At subject level,inanimate subjects in inanimate neutral-subject sentences and inanimate-subject sentences from conceptual metaphor can be retained as subjects in the target sentences;and inanimate subjects in inanimate recipient-subject sentences and inanimate formal-subject sentences can be converted to other sentence components like objects and adverbials in the target sentences;and inanimate subjects in inanimate-subject sentences from grammatical metaphor can be converted to predicates.At the sentence level,the inanimate recipient-subject sentence and the inanimate-subject sentence from grammatical metaphor can be transferred into Chinese animate-subject sentences;and the inanimate formalsubject sentence can be converted into the Chinese non-subject sentence.From the perspective of cultural thought pattern,it is found that in the translation of inanimate subject,there are a lot of nominalization structures in the original text,which is the product of the grammaticalization.The nominalization leads to abstract nouns,reflecting the abstract thinking pattern shown in the source context.The nominalization structures can be converted into verbs,making the target text specific and concrete,which reflects Chinese concrete thinking pattern;For the sentence translation,the concept of “the separation between external world and human” lies in the inanimate recipientsubject sentences in the source text,characterized by describing things objectively,which reflects the objective thinking shown in the source context.The conversion from inanimate-subject sentences into animate-subject sentences shows Chinese subject thinking with the agent-centered and people-oriented feature.