English-Chinese Translation of Adpositional Structures Under the Guidance of Clause Complex Theory

Adpositional structures are commonly seen in English language, as there is one adposition in every eight English words statistically; Chinese, however, relies much less on such structures. In light of this prominent difference between the two languages, this paper aims to analyse English adpositional structures under the analytical framework of Clause Complex model, and provides a new approach to the English-Chinese translation of such structures and its teaching. By applying Clause Complex Theory to the analysis of English sentences and Parsing-Translating-Assembling translation model (PTA model) to the reproduction of corresponding Chinese sentences, over 5,000 sentences are processed. In our work, adpositional structures are looked into and categorised as follows: prepositional structures include (1) prep. + Ving, (2) prep. + wh-clause, and (3) A + prep. + B + prep. + C; postpositional structures consist of: (1) word, (2) phrase, and (3) attributive clause; circumpositional structures are studied as well. Meanwhile, their respective translation processes are demonstrated through the PTA model.