Comparison Of Two Translations Of Pride And Prejudice From Perspective Of Hypotaxis And Parataxis

Hypotaxis and parataxis are an important subject in Contrastive Linguistics andTextual Linguistics. It is undoubted that English lays stress on hypotaxis and Chineseputs emphasis on parataxis, but when doing translation, we should take relativity intoconsideration as well, along with pragmatic factors. Therefore, this thesis is aimed todemonstrate relativity through comparison of two Chinese versions of Pride andPrejudice that have received wide accolade. Translating would die if it mechanicallystickedtoturninghypotaxicalEnglishintoparatacticChineseandviceversa,sincesuchahandlingoftranslationwouldonlymaketranslationtheoriessimplisticandabsolute.From the perspectives of culture, linguistics and translation comparison, the thesisexplores the universality and relativity of hypotaxis and parataxis and related translatingtechniques. Chapter One is devoted to analysis from the perspective of cultures, in whichcontrastive studies of Chinese and western philosophies and modes of thinking are done.It is observed that hypotaxis-prominence in English stems from western atomicphilosophy and formal logic, whereas parataxis in Chinese is heavily influenced bytraditional synthetic philosophy and fuzzy logic. Chapter Two is unfolded linguistically.English is hypotaxical and Chinese paratactic at the sentential level; at the textual level,both are observed to be hypotaxical due to their depending on textual cohesive elementsfor coherence. It can be therefore said that both of them are hypotaxical at this level.Besides,pragmaticfactorslikethetypeofatextandtheuniquenessofawriter'swordingshould also be incorporated into a translator's practice. Given this, the author selects twoversions of a literary text, Pride and Prejudice, to make a comparison in Chapter Three.In the process, it is observed that both translators, Sun Zhili and Wang Keyi, do not onlyturn a hypotaxical text into a paratactic translation in which S-P mechanism, explicitlogical indicators and"grape"type of sentences are replaced by T-C and flowing-watertypeofsentences,butalsoretainthefeatureofhypotaxisinsomeplaces.Thus,theauthordraws a conclusion that both universality and relativity are involved in the issue of hypotaxis and parataxis of English and Chinese and only when dialectics is applied cantranslation studies keep moving forward.