Differences Between Chinese And English Thought Patterns And Translation Strategies

The thought pattern difference is a part of the cultural differences between the oriental and the occidental countries. The traditional thoughts greatly influence the traditional culture, and different thought patterns, which help form the uniqueness of national culture, reflect the various thought characteristics and styles of different nations. Generally speaking, thought patterns decide the structure of one language, and this means a lot to the solution of the cultural conflict in the process of translation. Since translation is to serve as a tool in communication among nations, it is necessary for the translator to transplant the expression embedded with cultural characteristics of the source language to the target language. It is also of great help for the native scholars to study the foreign cultural factors and their influences on the native language. Only totally knowing the thought pattern differences of the users of different languages can translators have an overall and exact understanding of the source text, which enables them to choose the right methods and proper words and expressions for good translation.This paper tends to use various methods of comparing, enumerating, and exemplifying to discuss the thought pattern differences of the Chinese and the English-speaking people. It covers the details of different thought patterns, reasons of these differences, and the E-C translation strategies concerning the thought pattern differences.The paper is divided into six parts. It starts from the general introduction of the present researches on thought patterns and the future development in this field. Chapter Two gives a comprehensive discussion of the dialectical relationship between language, thought pattern and translation, and points out the importance of thought patterns to translation. The representations of different thought patterns between the Chinese and the English-speaking people are given by examples in Chapter Three. They include synthetic thought vs. analytic thought, image thought vs. abstract thought, ordinal thought vs. inverse thought, and subjective thought vs. objective thought. The cultural causes of these differences, which include...