Translating English Long Sentences Into Chinese

It is suggested that foreignizing strategies be adopted in translating materials concerning culture, for through it we can introduce new ideas to the culture of the target language. On the other hand, it is believed that all these cultural information shall be expressed in words that the target language readers can understand. But the author of this paper ventures to go beyond this debate, and maintains that domesticating strategies and foreignizing strategies are realized not only on the cultural level but also on the linguistic level, and that facing the great differences between two languages, such as English and Chinese, the translator, who would like to convey the content and spirit of the source text to the readers, would adopt the domesticating strategy on the sentence level, in order to present the readers with an idiomatic translation that can be easily understood.English and Chinese belong to different language families and there are great differences between them, and that is why English long sentences are difficult to translate. If the features of the original sentences are kept, the Chinese readers would encounter difficulties in reading and in understanding the content and spirit of the source text. It is both advisable and necessary to adopt the domesticating strategy from the point of syntax. Since a translation is to be read, the readers' approval is the best praise for the translator. A translation that puzzles the readers with linguistic features of the source text would be pointless.In this paper, differences between English and Chinese in syntax are examined from the following aspects. English is syntactical while Chinese is analytical;English is characterized by hypotaxis while Chinese is parataxis;the basic structure of English sentences is subject-predicate while that of Chinese sentences is topic-comment;English has post-modifiers while Chinese has no such modifiers.These differences influence the translator, who is also a reader of the source text and hasdifficulties in reading. Difficulties in understanding English long sentences include three aspects. Firstly, the elements of an English sentence, such as the subject, the object, the complement and the adverbial, can expand in their own way, thus the sentence may get longer without limit. Secondly, the relationship between the main clause and the subordinate clauses and the relationship between the clauses are complicated, or even in a mess. Thirdly, there is no equivalence in Chinese for there-be structure, anticipatory // and post-modifiers.On the basis of a full understanding of the source text, the translator enters the stage of translating, which is also full of obstacles. Through studying Zhang Guruo's translation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, I have learned a lot about how to translate embedded clauses, adverbials, post-modifiers and long sentences. And I have summarized the techniques of translating English long sentences as follows: keeping the original sequence;changing the original sequence;splitting the sentence;converting a prepositional phrase into a clause and converting a post-modifier into a pre-modifier.I have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the two basic translation strategies from the point of syntax and drawn my final conclusion, that is, given the differences between English and Chinese and that the readers would not expect difficulties in reading, we would adopt the domesticating strategy on the sentence level in translating English long sentences.