On The Translation Methods Of Long Sentences

In English-Chinese translation, long English sentences has been one of the difficulties for translators, due to the fact that they are usually more informative in meaning, and that a long sentence may contain clauses or a string of phrases, which often result in a complicated syntactic structure. The translation of long English sentences is a critical part of the whole translation, and the quality may decide the quality of the whole translation text to some extent. English-Chinese translation, especially the translation of long English sentences, is not to be done word-for-word. Linguistic features of both English and Chinese should be considered and appropriate translation methods should be adopted.Chinese and English belong to different language families. The fundamental differences of English and Chinese can be categorized into hypotaxis and parataxis. The English language is generally hypotactic, using many long sentences, where there are conjunctions and other connectives to show the relationship between elements of the sentences. In comparison, the Chinese language is generally paratactic, often using a series of short sentences, usually with no obvious logic indications. A careful comparision of the differences between English and Chinese will help with the improvement of the efficiency and quality of the translation of long English sentences. In order to translate long English sentences effectively, the first step is to analyze the structure and make sense out of the logical relations between sentence elements. Based on the paratactic characteristics in the Chinese way of syntactic expression, we can make use of corresponding strategies and techniques for translating the meaning in long English sentences in typical and idiomatic Chinese structures.Upon summarizing the previous studies in this field, after a brief comparison of the differences between Chinese and English, and after an analysis of some real examples of the author’s translation of long sentences in the novel titled Seed of Hope, this thesis attempts to summarize some practical techniques in the translation of long English sentences. Taking into consideration the basic functions of long English sentences, the author classifies them into descriptive long sentences and declarative long sentences, with respect to the text type concerned. Due to the limit of time and space, the author focuses mainly on the critical comments on the translation of some typical instances of long English sentences, especially from the word order perspective. After some comparison and analysis, the author arrives at four common methods:translating in the original order, translating in the reverse order, the splitting approach, and the integrated approach. The effectiveness of these methods has been verified in the author’s translation of long sentences in the novel Seed of Hope, and it is hoped that the present study will offer some help in future long sentence translation, especially in similar translation projects.