This paper has the following three objectives: Firstly, it’s about awareness of word conversion. Generally speaking, there is a lack of clear awareness of conversion in English-Chinese translation. And translation isn’t simply a process which is conducted with the pattern of word-to-word correspondence. Thus, the primary aim of this thesis is to evoking the sense of conversion in translation.

Secondly, it’s about skills of word conversion. The fundamental objective of this paper is giving a relatively comprehensive description and explanation about some skills of word conversion, which indicate how English word classes transformed into other Chinese word classes, from the references and the author’s own understanding.源Z自)751+文`论,文]网[www.751com.cn

Thirdly, it’s about application of word conversion. Methods to converting the words are proposed in this paper. The application of these techniques also will be mentioned. 

The research on conversion of word class in China is still not perfecting. This means that most of the studies are limited on the shift of one certain word class. Instead, this paper is concerned with different genres of word conversion by detailed description and explanation. And some studies use the inadequate examples. On the contrary, sufficient examples are presented in this paper. In a word, this paper is worth writing in order to make the research of conversion more comprehensive.

This paper is pided into four parts: The first part is a general introduction. It introduces the current researches about word conversion, research objectives, and research methodologies, significance of the study and the organization of this paper. The second part is literature review. In this part, the previous researches and the related studies are reviewed. Finally, the inadequacies are presented. The third part is techniques of every kinds of word conversion in English-Chinese translation. This part provides detailed methods for different genres of word-class shift. The fourth part is conclusion. It is the last part which includes the summary, the major findings and the limitations of this thesis and the suggestions for related researches.

II. On Word Conversion

It has been the recognition that word conversion is one of the most important translation techniques in English-Chinese translation. To better understand and study word conversion, it is necessary to review the definition of conversion and relevant researches on this thesis. 

2.1 Definition of Word Conversion

Word conversion, which is a grammatical transformation brought about whereby derivation of the meaning of the word, “refers to the phenomenon that one certain word class can be directly used as another word class without any form change on the original word” (Si 27). 

The famous translator Lu Dianyang once points out that we cannot translate English mechanically word for word into another European language to achieve adequacy, still less can we translate English into Chinese since this is determined by the fact that Chinese and English are two entirely different languages. Therefore, when we translate English into Chinese, shifting the word class is absolutely needed. To a certain extent, what we call word conversion in English-Chinese translation may be defined in the specific way as transformation of some certain word classes in English into some other word classes in Chinese.