英语翻译论文:英语“Which”从句汉译方法研究

摘要：本文是英语翻译论文，本文的目的是制定一个规范的用法”，“为在前人研究的基础上对PTA模型，找出系统的标注方法的句子介绍”，“总结可行的翻译技巧”，“条款。

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CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Background

As the acceleration of the cultural exchanges and the development of translation industry, long English sentences appear in higher frequency when translated into Chinese. After annotating a great deal of English sentences from the Treebank Project’s corpus of the Wall Street Journal, we found difficulties in translating long English sentences into Chinese. “Which”, as a relative pronoun and an interrogative adjective, plays an important role in forming the long sentence. When translating the clauses introduced by “which”, translators should recognize its syntactic structure and have a clear word usage interpretation. However, as the worldwide popularity of English and the flexible nature of language, there are many interpretations from various perspectives for the usage of “which” both in China and abroad. So it is necessary to summarize a systematic usage of “which” on the basis of previous researches for analyzing the functions of “which” in each English sentence, so as to improve the quality of translation outputs. Besides, in the first step of attempt regarding applying Generalized Topic Structure (GTS) theory on English sentences, it has been found that this theory can help the process of tagging and translating long English sentences. As the research requires a differentiated tagging system and comparatively fixed translation techniques, the idea of researching “which” clauses from the perspective of GTS theory popped up. 论文微信号：dissertation-essay

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1.2 Research Significance

On the basis of previous researches, this thesis is going to summarize four major usages of “which”, which can help analyze the functions of the word “which” in long English sentences, especially in the case of non-interrogative sentences. Besides, it will also offer comparatively comprehensive rules of tagging “which” clauses for the parsing step of the PTA model. As for the translating part, this thesis will conclude systematic translation techniques of “which” clauses in long English sentences. So this research attempts to solve the shortcomings appeared in previous long sentences translations and improve the quality of translation output under the support of corpus building.

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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Research of Long English Sentences Translation

In the course of annotation work, long English sentences popped up as the most frequent and difficult problem. Parsing long sentences and assembling those separated clauses are time-consuming. Therefore, it is necessary to collect other researches of long English sentences translation and work out more practical translation techniques to make the annotation work more efficient and effective. The translation of the long sentence is perhaps the most difficult of all in the process of English-Chinese translation (许建平，2003). The English sentence is extremely plastic. It can be enlarged, combined, adjusted with almost any degree of fitness to accommodate a writer’s thought. In other words, English sentences are mainly in an architecture style. It has complete syntactic structure (连淑能，2010:90). As for the Chinese, we can say Chinese tend to express their thoughts in a chronicle style, they usually streamline the thoughts, which limits the length of the sentence. According to the statistics, the optimal number of words of a Chinese sentence is from 4 to 12 (连淑能，2010:93). However, the average number of words of common English sentences wrote by professional writer is 20 (Robins, 1980:147) and by people who received education is 25 (Cheney, 1982:163). That means, although modern English sentences are no longer as long as the sentences in the Elizabeth era, long sentence is still a common language phenomenon in English, while in Chinese, people prefer shorter sentences.

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2.2 The Research of “Which”

Early in 1904, Charles Talbut Onions’ book An Advanced English Syntax had presented the main facts of current English syntax in a systematic form. In the book, he summarized that “which” is a pronoun and adjective that refer to both persons and things (Onions, 1904:138). Besides, as a relative pronouns, “which” is always equivalent to and (or but), this (or that), and these equivalents are now usually preferred as a matter of style (Onions, 1904:139). Long provided a more comprehensive usage of “which” in his book The Sentence and Its Parts. However, his seven different usages and a plenty of examples listed in the book illustrated that “Which” is used as a determiner or a determiner modifier, or it can be used in subordinate-interrogative clauses, in nounal constructions in interrogative clauses, etc.(Long, 1961:313-314). Knud Schibsbye explained the usage of “which” and creatively compared the difference of “which” and “what” in detail. He believed “which” is used both substantively and adjectivally of both persons and non-persons, and it can be used interrogatively of one or more of a group implied or stated in the context (Schibsbye, 1970:236-251). In the introduction of identifying and non-identifying relative clauses in the book Practical English Usage, Michael Swan differentiated the usage of “whose”, “that”, “who”, “whom” and “which” and noted typical mistakes in using “which” (Swan, 1980:526-533).

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CHAPTER THREE RESEARCH METHOD ........... 17

3.1 Raw Language Materials of the Research ....... 18

3.2 The Process of Tagging ..... 18

3.3 The Tool of Tagging .......... 21

CHAPTER FOUR RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ........... 23

4.1 “Which” Clauses as Subject Modifiers ........... 23

4.2 “Which” Clauses as Object Modifiers ............ 27

4.3 “Which” Clauses Following Prepositions ....... 30

4.4 “Which” as a Sentential Relative .......... 36

CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION ........ 39

5.1 Summary ....... 39

5.2 Limitations .... 43

5.3 Implications ............. 44

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CHAPTER FOUR RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Under the guidance of PTA model and N-T clause, we have already annotated more than 3000 sentences from the texts of the Wall Street Journal. From the perspective of pragmatics, the usage and tagging method of “which” clauses that are suitable for PTA model has been summarized in the process of this research, and the translation techniques of each tagging category are also presented as follows:

4.1 “Which” Clauses as Subject Modifiers

According to the statistics, 24% of which clauses are used to modify subjects. This kind of which clauses are usually non-restrictive attributive clauses, which means most of the subject and the “which” clause are separated by a comma. Here is a sentence from the Wall Street Journal: The Roper Organization, which conducted the survey, said almost half of the exercise equipment owners found it duller than they expected. In this sentence, “The Roper Organization” is the naming part, while other two clauses are the telling parts. Which, as a relative pronoun, is a Reference of the subject “the Roper Organization”. So we tag this kind of “which” clauses as “WS”, which means this kind of clauses is used to modify subjects. After adding a necessary punctuation, the output will be “开展这个调查的罗普组织称，几乎一半的练习设备所有者都发现健身设备比他们预期的更无聊。” This example presents the assembling rule which is suitable for this category: put the “which” clause in the front of the subject as a pre-attribute. This rule is proved feasible in 41% of sentences which contain “which” clauses used to modify the subject. However, other sentences in this category are unsuited to employ this rule.

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CONCLUSION

Look back to the research questions mentioned in the second part, it can be seen that these questions have already been answered. Till now, under the guidance of the GTS theory, we have tagged more than 3000 long English sentences from the English texts of the Wall Street Journal, of which 10.7% sentences includes “which” clauses. In these “which” clauses, 24.3% of “which” clauses is used to modify subjects, 50.4% of “which” clauses is for describing objects, 15.3% of “which” clauses follows prepositions, 4.5% of “which” serves as a sentential relative and other kinds of it account for 5.5%. First, the GTS theory is suitable for analyzing English texts. Those ten examples listed in the fourth part have proved that the naming-telling pattern can be applied on most of English sentences, just like the topic-comment pattern in Chinese. According to the naming-telling pattern, a series of tagging marks have been created. For example, we tag the name part as “NM” and the verbal predicate clause as “PRD”. After sorting out and analyzing these “which” clauses, we divide them into four groups and provide their tagging methods: 1). when “which” clauses are used to modify subjects, we use “WS” to tag the clause; 2). when “which” clauses are used to modify objects, we use “WO” to tag the clause; 3). when “which” as a sentential relative, we use “WC” to tag the clause and 4). When “which” follows a preposition, we use “WPO” to tag the clause. There actually includes other more detailed classifications within each group, which will be analyzed and verified in the future research.

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Reference documents (omitted)

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