Europeanizing Influence Of Translation On Modern Written Chinese

According to Sapir (1997: 173), languages are rarely sufficient unto themselves. So one language should contact and interact with other languages in order that it can get itself improved and perfected. English-Chinese translation, which generally began from the 17^th century, has greatly triggered and facilitated the development of Chinese. The major outcome of English-Chinese translation leads to the Europeanization¹ of Chinese. Europeanization of Chinese whose origin can be tracked back to the Opium War more than a hundred years ago starts as a result of the May^th New Culture Movement. With translation of the Western literary works, the Chinese language is influenced by Western language. The evolution of the Vernacular Chinese into today's Modem Chinese is a process of constant Europeanization after the May Fourth Movement.First of all this thesis reviews briefly the historical situation of the Europeanization of Chinese and provides a general picture of various ideas concerning the Europeanization of Chinese. Then this thesis analyzes the contributing factors for the Europeanization of Chinese and comes to the conclusion that Europeanization is an inevitable event in the development of Chinese. Europeanized Grammar in this thesis is divided into two categories: Morphological Europeanization and Syntactic Europeanization. Morphological Europeanization of Modern Chinese consists of the acceleration of affixation and Europeanization of the pluralizing sign "men". The thesis deals with syntactic Europeanized constructions in Chinese, such as lengthy sentence structure, Europeanized passive with "bei", word order change, the increased use of conjunctions, the change in the sub-categories of word, the increasing use of the copula verb shi, Europeanized preposition "dang" in adverbials of time, and textual Europeanization, etc.The thesis also makes a critical interpretation of Europeanized Grammar on Modern written Chinese. Europeanization has exerted some systemic influence on modern Chinese. However, it is an external factor in the course of the Chinese development. The development of a language is the common consequence of external influence and the internal mechanism of the language itself. Parataxis and word order which is characterized by the iconicity of temporal order are the internal mechanism of Chinese.This thesis can not cover all the Europeanized features of Chinese because of the limited space. We will make further study in the future studies.