A Comparative Study On Subject-Predicate And Topic-Comment Sentences In Translation

English has long been recognized as subject-prominent. Its sentences have a tree-like structure. Subject and predicate play a dominant role in a sentence. They form the trunk to which other elements are connected systematically. Predicate must be in agreement with its subject grammatically. Semantically, there is a direct selectional relationship between subject and predicate, too. Word form, word class and the grammatical position of words in a sentence are closely related. Words cannot be chosen freely to fill in a grammatical position of a sentence. On the whole, an English sentence is controlled by its subject and predicate with both grammar and meaning as underlying rules.Unlike English, Chinese is topic-prominent. The topic is the head of a sentence. It is usually definite and takes the initial position of a sentence. The topic is what the sentence talks about. Comments follow the topic in a logical order. This kind of sentence structure does not have comprehensive grammatical rules. Meaning rather than grammar is the key factor. Grammatically, there is no topic-comment(T-C) agreement. Comments just need to be about the topic in meaning without caring much about grammatical issues like word class. On the whole, topic-comment sentences, the main sentence type in Chinese, are led by topic and based on mainly a single-track system-meaning.Considering all these differences in sentence structure, translators find switching subject-predicate(S-P) into topic-comment sentences is often necessary but difficult in English-Chinese translation. To make this switch successful, the first step is to choose the proper topic of a sentence. Anything a sentence talks about is the topic. Grammar is not important here. Meaning is the major thing to consider. When the topic is chosen, cut the sentence into semantic units. Any phrase, word or even affix, if it has a relatively complete meaning, can be seen as a semantic unit. The last step is to translate these semantic units and rearrange them in a logical order following the topic. Necessary functional words can be added to make the logic of a sentence flow smoothly.The necessity of structural adaptation during Chinese-English translation also poses great difficulty to translators. To solve this difficulty, when variation of sentence patterns is involved, the first step is to ascertain the subject of an English sentence. And the second step involves the identification of the predicate of an English sentence. If a Chinese sentence contains more than one verb, the predicate intended in the English counterpart usually derives from the verbs in the Chinese sentence as the situation dictates. Last but not least, as grammatical rules in terms of formal agreement are not rigidly followed in the construction of Chinese sentences, some adjustments have to be made to their English counterparts in accordance with the English grammar.Following this method, the translated sentences will be more natural for native speakers of target language.