A Justification For Syntactic Transformation In Translation-From The Perspective Of Different Degrees Of Iconicity In Syntax Between Chinese And English

The syntactic transformation, as one of the translation phenomenon, widely exists in the process of translation. Many linguists and translators have done some researches on the syntactic transformation in translation and provided many practical translation techniques, but they have done nothing to provide any solid ground for the employment of such techniques. What is the rationale of transformation in translation? How can it be analyzed systematically from the perspective of linguistics? On the basis of the syntactic iconicity in cognitive linguistics, this paper aims to make a contrastive study of the salient difference in terms of iconicity in syntax between English and Chinese, and then finds out their different degrees of syntactic iconicity in order to explain the rationality of syntactic transformation in translation.According to the iconicity theory, the structures of language bear a similarity to the structures of concept and experience in reality. This paper concentrates on the syntactic iconicity. Within the Motivation, four main principles are discussed: the principle of order iconicity, the principle of distance iconicity, the principle of quantity iconicity, and the principle of markedness iconicity. The last three principles mainly give an explanation to the iconicity within each language at the level of words, phrases and clauses, or their different semantic, pragmatics, stylistic or rhetoric characteristics. However, the difference of syntactic iconicity mainly represents in the principle of sequence iconicity. With abundant examples, this paper probes the difference of the principle of sequence iconicity between Chinese and English from three aspects of temporal, spatial and logic sequence.Iconicity widely exists in various languages but with different degrees. The syntactic iconicity between English and Chinese is different because of their different ways of sequencing information. In Chinese, the sentences are organized by means of two mediums: word order and functional words, but English possesses the mediums of both word order and functional words as well as one more medium of morphology. Thus, the order of English sentences is more flexible. From this perspective, Chinese has a higher degree of syntactic iconicity while English has a higher degree of abstraction. In order to justify the transformation in translation, this paper has analyzed the syntactic transformation from the following four aspects: i) senseless translation without syntactic transformation; ii) unacceptable translation without syntactic transformation; iii) acceptable but marked translation with inadequate transformation; and iv) unmarked translation with adequate syntactic transformation. Moreover, some principles other than the iconicity-based principles which will also influence the rearrangement of sentence structures in translation are taken into consideration as well. The author has made a complementary analysis on three other principles to further explain the rationale of transformation in translation. It is of great importance for this paper to provide well-founded guidance for translation practice and teaching process.