On The English Translation Of Chinese Sentence Without Subject

In view of the difference on the indispensability of subject between English and Chinese, this thesis makes a study on the English translation of Chinese sentence without subject-a common construction in Chinese. Together with a review of the former studies on the Chinese sentence without subject and its translation into English, the author gives a precise definition and classification of Chinese sentence without subject (including subject-less sentence and sentence with subject omitted) and based on these, comes to a summarization of main principles and skills by selecting abundant examples from books and articles on C-E translation or contrastive study.The analysis shows that compared with the topic-prominence and personal subject of Chinese language, subject-prominence and impersonal subject take up a large proportion in English language. Given the wide differences between those two languages as well as a small portion of similarities, the translator, in consideration of context and coherence, should seek to represent their commonness and make necessary changes to fully respect the characteristic of the target language and make the most of its advantage. Therefore, during the English translation of Chinese sentence without subject, imperative sentence and inverted structure are adopted with regard to the similarities between those two languages. However, skills, such as the change of active voice into passive one and predicate verb into participle, addition of generic pronoun or general words and conjunction as well as the use of informal subject "It" and the "There+Be structure", all reflect the particular features of English, i.e. the indispensability of subject, impersonal subject and overt cohesion. Furthermore, one thing should come to our notice. That is to say, on translation, we should be flexible to choose certain skill as the case might be.To sum up, Chinese sentence without subject is a linguistic phenomenon which cannot be neglected during C-E translation. It is our expectation that such a study can shed new light on translating structures of this kind for an improved communication between China and the rest of the world.