Hypotaxis And Parataxis In Translating Informative Texts

18th and19th century witnessed the revival of classical culture with archaeologicalexcavations carried out all over Greece and ruins of ancient cities exposed to the sun. Greekculture is a treasure left by ancient Greeks and exerts profound influence on the western and eventhe world’s formative arts. Michael Norris, a researcher with Greek Gallery of the MetropolitanMuseum of Art, compiled a textbook in2000titled Greek Art: From Prehistoric to Classical tointroduce Greek art to middle school students for better understanding of classical culture.The writer translated the first five chapters of this book before analyzing the translationprocess. As teaching material of art history, this book is quite professional and inclusive rangingfrom archaeology, history to literature, thus a typical informative text according to the text typetheory proposed by Peter Newmark. Disparities between syntactic structures of English andChinese have been noted and compared. Hypotactic English sentences were restructured to getsyntactic Chinese one so as to ensure that the translation is accurate and fluent. Besides, the writeralso examined the features of translating terms of artware-making and other professional languagepoints. The last part includes translation reflections and experience conclusions of the writer’stranslation referring to language competency, technical aids as well as the translator’s attitude andhabits.