A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Coordinate Constructions And Their Translation

In the contrastive study of English and Chinese languages, little attention was paid to coordinate constructions. There were just a few points mentioned in chapters on translation and a few papers were published. Besides , the main concern of these chapters and books seems to be just the differences of the word order, which is of course a problem that we encounter in coordinate constructions. As a matter of fact, however, there are far more complicated problems that have to be tackled with in the study of translation, such as the ellipsis and supply of coordinators, the understanding and transformation of coordinate constructions and the selecting of sentence patterns.Traditionally, differences of the word order between English and Chinese coordinate constructions are explained from the semantic point of view, which shows its limitation owing to the one-sidedness and over generalization. In this thesis, phonetic and pragmatic factors together with different modes of thinking are considered so as to enrich the traditional discussion.Coordination and parallisrn are common in paratactically featured Chinese where conjoins belonging to different statuses are acceptable. If this structure is introduced into English, English readers will find it difficult to understand. In this thesis, the author holds that the deep structures of Chinese sentences should be carefully examined, and hierarchical structures should be selected so that the translated texts can conform to English modes of expression.To sum up, in view of the relatively insufficient investigation done in this field, the author makes a tentatively contrastive study of the English and Chinese coordinate construction by collecting and classifying various kinds of co-ordinations. The author, through the analysis of their differences both from a theoretical and a practical point of view, alsodraws a target-oriented principle to deal with coordinate constructions in the process of translation, and suggests some specific translating methods.The main body of the paper consists of the following: The introduction gives a deep structural view of the coordinate construction and analyses the complexities of such structures, suggesting general principles in translation.Chapter One begins with syntactic differences between English and Chinese, presenting the differences between syndetic coordination and asyndetic coordination. In translation, hypotactic structures have to be converted into paratactic ones, reducing the amount of unnecessary conjunctions or vice versa. Moreover, if co-ordinations appear in a criss-cross arrangement, the target-oriented principle should be adopted.Chapter Two discusses similarities and differences between the word order of English and Chinese coordinate constructions. These differences are considered in terms of semantics, phonetics and pragmatics. In translation, the guideline of "serving the readers of the target language" should be followed and therefore adequate adjustments have to be made in the word order.Chapter Three specifically deals with Chinese parallel structures such as four-character-structufes and parallel predicate verbs. Based on the target-oriented principle, the author suggests different methods of translation from Chinese into English, such as preserving the construction, blending and hierarchical structuring, etc.Chapter Four discusses a special phenomenon - instances of "pseudo-co-ordinations" both in English and in Chinese, pointing out that in translation, correct understanding is of vital importance and attention must be paid to the deep structures of the sentences. In particular, when we translate sentences from Chinese into English, the hierarchical structure should be taken into account if conjoined Chinese elements are not parallel in status.In the Conclusion, the author emphasizes that besides a comparative analysis of the superficial structure of languages, translation study should also consider the differences in thought pattern and aesthetic taste. Only in this way can we expect...