Analysis Of Hypotaxis And Parataxis In English And Chinese At Textual Level And Translation

One of the most important contrast between Chinese and English is hypotaxis and parataxis. The fact that Chinese shows paratactic prominence and that English hypotactic prominence makes great differences in textual cohesion between the two langauges. With the guide of the textual translation theory, the paper makes a contrastive analysis in sentence structures and their influence on the textual cohesions. By means of comparison between the English and Chinese language, this paper offers a brief analysis of the hypotactic and paratactic phenomena in the two languages. The comparison is conducted from three aspects, that is, the causes of hypotactic and paratactic traditions in English and Chinese; the different cohesive devices used in hypotaxis and parataxis; the enlightenment the study throws on translation. The thesis holds that, although differences of hypotaxis and parataxis exist between the two languages, the contrast is not absolute and translators should be cautious and flexible when handling with cohesive strategies. It also provides examples to illustrate and analyze some of those strategies. Furthermore, the paper argues that the notions of hypotaxis and parataxis should be studied in a complete, thorough and all-sided way. On the one hand, our attention should be paid to the characteristics of English and Chinese sentences and structures below the sentence level----English is more hypotactic while Chinese more paratactic. On the other hand, it is crucially important to study the different functions of hypotactic and paratactic structures at the level of texts in the two languages. Lexically paratactic structures are often found in English paragraphs, and hypotactic structures in the form of repetition and parallelism are frequently employed in Chinese. The author thus recommends that the characteristics of hypotactic and paratactic structures in English and Chinese be researched in a dialectic way, so as to improve the old translation techniques and further contrastive study of the two languages.