On How To Avoid Chinglish From The Perspective Of Hypotaxis And Parataxis

Translation, as a bridge for communication, plays an increasingly important role in facilitating international exchange of politics, economy and cultures. However, Chinglish, a common phenomenon existing in Chinese-English (C-E) translation, adversely affects the quality of the translated versions, thus affecting China's communication with the rest of the world. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze and figure out the translation techniques to avoid Chinglish in C-E translation.Chinglish is described by Joan Pinkham (2000) as idiomatic"English with Chinese characteristics". Among various causes that give rise to Chinglish, the main one is the differences between Chinese and English, while among those discrepancies the most distinctive one is that Chinese emphasizes parataxis, while English hypotaxis. Therefore, the author of this thesis, from the perspective of parataxis and hypotaxis, makes a comparison between Chinese and English in terms of lexicon, syntax and text. At lexical level, English abounds in various parts of speech and connective words while Chinese lacks these devices; at syntactical level, the English sentence stresses a subject-predicate structure whereas Chinese ones a topic-comment structure; at textual level, English highlights the form while Chinese, the meaning.Based on the contrast between hypotaxis and parataxis, the thesis, taking the translations of news about Ocean University of China (OUC) as examples, elaborates the manifestations of Chinglish and puts forward some translation techniques to avoid this phenomenon. Chinglish, at lexical level, is characterized by unnecessary words, repetition etc.; at syntactic level, improper subject, illogical structure etc.; at textual level, the conversion between overt cohesion and covert coherence etc. Correspondingly, the solutions to Chinglish include omission, substitution, shift of perspective, conversion of part of the speech and the usage of subordinate structure and so on. Proper employment of these solutions can help, to the largest extent, avoid Chinglish and thus the expected effect of the communication can be achieved.