Translating Long Sentences From English Into Chinese Under Construction Grammar

Even though the semantic meaning is shared by different languages, the ways to realize the meaning are quite different. There are by far a large amount of techniques related to the translation of English long sentences into Chinese, with most of them analyzed from the syntactic perspective and there are relatively few new techniques based on new theories of linguistics.Construction Grammar is a branch of cognitive linguistics which can provide a theoretical basis for long sentences translation as the semantic relation is the deep reason of expressing the original sentences according to the habits of the target language. According to Construction Grammar, construction can be generalized from specific sentences so that the semantic roles of different constructions can be classified.The concept "chunk" is put forward as a translation unit in this thesis as a relatively complete semantic unit to translate long English sentences. The semantic relations of chunks can be divided into three types, logical relation, locating relation and attributive relation. The differences in realizing the semantic relations between the two languages of English and Chinese can be shown in the following two aspects, that is, the principles of structuring a sentence and the forms to realize different semantic relations. English sentences are relatively flexible in organizing word order but the principle of temporal sequence and background-foreground sequence is usually followed by Chinese sentences. Besides, there are different forms to realize semantic relations in English while there are fewer of that in Chinese.With the methods of languages contrasts and giving examples, after analyzing English long sentences in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with chunks as the means for analysis, translators can analyze the semantic relations among different chunks and rearrange the chunks to produce natural translated versions. This thesis has put forward that under Construction Grammar, the moving of chunks is a new way of realizing long sentences translation.It is advised in this thesis to analyze the semantie relations according to Construction Grammar first and then represent the sentence in the Chinese expressing way.