Parataxis And Hypotaxis

Translation is a rendering from one language (source language) into another (target language). On the one hand, owing to the great disparity between two languages concerned which always presents difficulties in the process of translation, contrastive studies provide a sensible approach to the resolution. On the other hand, language is an external manifestation of a nation's thought and culture in the deep sense. The differences between languages are influenced and determined by certain underlying intrinsic mechanism. Therefore, contrastive studies only on the surface structures are never enough. It also needs to make contrastive studies in cultures, philosophical thoughts and modes of thinking of the languages concerned.The thesis gives a contrastive study of the syntax of Chinese and that of English to reveal that the most distinguishable difference between Chinese and English is that Chinese is a language of parataxis, while English is that of hypotaxis; explores the underlying mechanism attributed to this major syntactic heterology and goes further to arrive at some rules or skills which may serve as a guide to improve the quality of translation in the process of interlingual transference. The thesis is concerned only with the translation from Chinese into English which is more demanding than the translation vice versa.The thesis consists of seven chapters. Chapters One and Seven are Introduction and Conclusion respectively. The main part of the thesis has three sections. The first section (Chapter Two) focuses on how Chinese differs from English at all syntactic levels in terms of hypotaxis and parataxis, including word, phrase, simple sentence and multiple sentences. Then, Section two (Chapter Three) traces back to explore the reflections of hypotaxis and parataxis in their cultures, philosophic thoughts and modes of thinking from three aspects. The last section ( Chapters Four, Five and Six) tries to deduce some translation skills which can serve as a guide for translation practice in two syntactic ways: the sentence making and word usage, with Chapter Four about how to fit the Chinese topic-prominence into the English subject-prominence, the choice of predicate in Chapter Five and the conversion from dynamic to static in Chapter Six.