When a noun-as-adjective construction is difficult to understand, the translator should revise the sentence to clarify the relations between the words. There are four ways to avoid this circumstance.

1. When there are two or three nouns together, one of them can be converted into another part of speech. For example:

A: Measures adopted by local governments in soil erosion control include the following.

B: Measures adopted by local governments to control soil erosion include the following.

A: The Party’s expanded leadership capacity in struggles

B: The Party’s expanded capacity to lead struggle

In certain circumstances, changing a noun to another part of speech will also serve to break up a longer sequence of nouns (or of nouns plus adjectives):

A: China’s meteorological system modernization drive

B: China’s drive to modernize its meteorological system

A: The reform of the science and technology management system

2. In some constructions made of two or three nouns it is possible to retain all of them as nouns, providing a preposition is introduced to show the connection between them:

A: During the economic recovery period in the early 1950s

B: During the period of economic recovery in the early 1950s

A: Golmud is an important personnel and materials transfer center

3. Sometimes the same clarifying effect can be achieved by using a hyphen, such as “3-year-old teacher”, “right-wing attacks”, “a fur-bearing animal”.

4. Sometimes the translator has tried to cram so much information into a noun-as-adjective phrase that it is not enough to change the noun into another part of speech or to insert a preposition or hyphen. Here again, as for other forms of the noun plague, when the usual methods are insufficient, the alternative solution is adding a few words to spell out the meaning.

A: The establishment of a local specialties company will enable us to use our foreign exchange effectively.

B: If we establish a company for the export of local specialties.

A: Shareholding restructuring of State enterprises was encouraged during the landmark 15^th Party Congress held last month.

取自The Translator’s Guide to Chinglish, by Joan Pinkham with the collaboration of Jiang Guihua；如有侵权，联系删除