Sentence Restructuring In English-chinese Long Sentence Translation—in The Translation Of Guangdong And Chinese Diaspora(excerpts)

Long sentence translation has always been a challenge in English-Chinese translation. From different language families, Chinese and English, vary in sentence structure, particularly in long sentence structure. The cause of structure variation is Chinese tends to be parataxis, and English to be hypotaxis. The difference can be further elaborated. Chinese is more like a bamboo with each sentence element interlocking with one another. English is more like a tree, with a trunk in the middle and branches agglutinated around. From the perspective of Chinese and English sentence difference, this report attempts to deal with the approaches in the long sentence translation that is based on the translation practice of a book written by a Chinese diaspora writer Yow Chun Hoe. This report holds that after having a thorough understanding of the original text, translators should not be held up in the original sentence structures; instead, they should restructure the original English sentence in accordance with Chinese sentence structure. Generally speaking, sentence restructuring consists of several approaches, but due to the limited time and space, only three will be discussed in this report, they are Pre-embedding, Cutting and Reversing.