A Contrastive Study On English-Chinese Syntactic Features In Translation

The impetus for the thesis comes from two continuous arguing questions, whether the nature of translating is an art or a skill, and what role intuition plays in the process of translation activity. In the field of translation, the bilingual competence, a kind of skill actually, should be sharpened so that translators can be more equal to their task. In the view of some translation theorists, intuition and innateness come naturally from a firm and profound grasp of both the source and the target language, as if translators were doing their jobs without any theoretical consideration. In fact they have consciously or unconsciously had a good mastery of contrastive linguistics, of which translation is regarded by many linguists as one branch. For that reason, this study aims at finding the inner features of both Chinese and English and expounding methods, which can bring about most natural translation.It has been widely acknowledged that translation is a typical bilingual activity, which has much to with linguistic studies in the original language as well as in the target language. This thesis, therefore, exemplifies the dissimilarities between modern standard Chinese and English as the main point of investigation. The information that contrastive analysis reveals can be well incorporated into translation activity, helping to decrease the potential interference of the original text and to minimize the translationese. Through contrastive study of the syntactic differences between Chinese and English, this paper points out that translation activity is, to a large extent, a process of syntactical reconstruction from the source information to the target language with appropriate and natural equivalent expressions.This thesis aims at revealing the characteristics of Chinese as well as English. However, the study of Chinese will be a bit more stressed, for it used to be systematized in a somewhat Westernized way in former grammar monographs and translation. As a matter of fact, Chinese is a language of unique history and culture, translators should retain its...