Translation Of Long And Complex English Sentences

Long and complex English sentences, just as the name implies, are long sentences with complicated structures. The most typical features of this kind of sentences are the comprehensive use of different subordinate clauses and the flexible use of all kinds of prepositional phrases and participle phrases, which lead to complex sentence structures and varied constituent relationships, and bring great difficulties to English-Chinese translation practice. Translation of long and complex English sentences is undoubtedly a huge challenge to examinees and translators. It is because good translation of this kind of sentences requires very high comprehensive capabilities, which contain a good grasp of vocabulary, grammar, discourse and cultural knowledge as well as very strong language organization abilities. In view of this, translators should learn to analyze the structures of long and complex English sentences in the usual translation practices, enhance the ability of logical thinking and language organization, summarize and make use of various translation skills and methods, and thus improve the efficiency and quality of translation.Based on this, this paper will use the author’s own translation practice to explore and study the translation of long and complex English sentences. The whole study aims at seeking translation skills of long and complex English sentences, providing scientific and effective translation methods referable to translators, and offering a support of methodology to the study in this field. The first chapter gives a specific interpretation of the research background and research steps of this paper. The second chapter conducts a comparative analysis of English and Chinese syntactic features from three aspects, and puts forward the corresponding translation methods. The third chapter gives a further analysis of the sentence features of long and complex English sentences, and puts forward the corresponding processing methods of the complex sentence constituents and all kinds of grammatical phenomena. The fourth chapter divides the translation process of long and complex English sentences into five steps with specific illustrations of each step, and discusses the handling methods of sentence constituent relationships. The fifth chapter analyzes and summarizes the translation skills of long and complex English sentences according to sentence translation order. The sixth chapter restates the research steps of the paper, describes the research conclusions of the paper, points out the deficiencies of the study, and expresses author’s prospects of the future study in this field.The paper concludes that, in the translation of long and complex English sentences, the translator should first determine the translation sequence of the whole sentence, namely, according to the differences of English and Chinese in the placement of important information, and in accordance with Chinese logical sequence, the translator decides whether to translate in the same order of the original text, or in reverse order of the original text, or in both of them. And then, the translator should well handle the expression methods of some specific sentence constituents, namely, according to the differences of English and Chinese in sentence length and closeness, and in accordance with Chinese expression methods, the translator decides whether to separate some sentence constituents and expressions from the modified constituents and expressions. Besides, when handling such grammatical phenomena as separation structure, inversion structure and elliptical structure, the translator should determine whether to maintain the original usage or make some adjustments. In short, in the translation of long and complex English sentences, the translator should first figure out the logic relationship of the original text, and then, according to the Chinese expression customs, make a flexible use of various translation methods and techniques, and finally he can get a faithful and smooth translated text.