Sentence Group: The Optimal Translation Unit In Chinese-english Translation

Translation unit (TU) is about the amount you deal with the source text each timeand at which level your target text is equivalent to your source text. For this reason, itmakes quite an impact on translation quality. As an intermediate layer between“sentence” and “text”, sentence group (SG) is a semantic unit rather than agrammatical one. Built around one topic, it is a cluster of sentences of centripetaleffect which are associated in logic, closely linked up in structure, and as for the tone,echoing each other in front and behind.An ideal translation unit must be both rational in theory and operable in practice.In this paper, the author firstly discusses on the the rationality of SG being the TU inC-E translation from the perspective of contrastive studies between Chinese andEnglish, as for its operability, it can be illustrated by exapmles extracted from CangHuang, an officialdom novel written by Wang Yuewen and to this end, two principlesand four procedures are put forward. The first principle directs at the internal relationunder a SG and it is suggested that a SG should be dealt with as an integrity andrestructuring should be resorted to in some cases; the second principle points at theexternal relation of a SG to its adjacent sentence groups and even to the whole text andthe paper holds that every SG should be analyzed and processed in the context and theconnection between two sentence groups should be a smooth and natural one. Theprocedure falls into four steps:1) divide the paragraph of the source text into a numberof sentence groups in accordance with the relative integrity and completeness bycontent;2) establish the main idea of each sentence group;3) find out the subordinaterelation or coordinating relation between topic sentences and supplementary sentences,and that between each other.4) translate Chinese into English.In a word, this paper holds that sentence group should be treated as the translationunit in C-E translation and the purpose behind delineating sentence group intotranslation unit is to remind the novice translator to build up the consciousness of SGand to work with concepts rather than words, with discourse rather than sentence inorder to avoid error, nonsense or just unidiomatic translation.