On the Translation of English “N+CM” Structures from the Perspective of Typology

That there exists opposite order difference of postpositional complex modifier(N+CM) vs prepositional complex modifier(CM+N) does not accord with the linguistic facts of English and Chinese."N+CM" correspondence and "N+CM" equivalence are dominant, while "CM+N" correspondence and "CM+N" equivalence are recessive between E-C CM.When translating English "N+CM", a corresponding order approach(COA) should be employed.All other things being equal, COA can maintain Chinese version equivalent, faithful to the greatest extent in the aspects of syntactic-semantic function, pragmatic-discourse function, prosody feature, and subjectivity degree to English "N+CM".Hence the "‘N+CM’ Correspondence⇒Best Functional Equivalence" translation strategy.The commonly accepted "CM+N" order approach is misleading translationese, resulting in no functional equivalence.This study shows that the theories/principles of linguistic typology can be applied to guide the translation of English "N+CM" structures and the functional equivalence is obtainable.