Subject-less Sentences In Chinese Legislative Texts And Their English Translation

There exist sharp differences of formal manifestation of subjects between the Chinese and English sentences. In a Chinese sentence, almost any kind of words can serve as subjects, even one sentence may have no subject. In contrast, the subject in English is always indispensable, and only nouns and personal pronouns in the nominative can be subjects. The asymmetry of subjects results in problems in the C-E translation. The thesis makes a study on the unique syntactic structure “subject-less sentences”, which are prevalent in both the ordinary language and Chinese legislative texts.The thesis, from the perspective of a contrastive study, attempts to study the fundamental discrepancies between the Chinese and English language through the cut-in points of language types and their manifestations of Chinese and English. The present study reviews the previous researches at home on subject-less sentences in the Chinese language and subject selecting issue, defines a subject-less sentence precisely and clarifies the distinction between subject-less sentences, sentences with subjects omitted, and sentences without subjects. Furthermore, the thesis scrutinizes again the big differences of legislative sentences between Chinese and English, in combination of the characteristics of legislative sentences in Chinese and English, and explains further the phenomenon of subject-less sentences in Chinese legislative texts. Finally, a qualitative study is conducted on the full illustration of examples from Chinese legislative texts and their bilingual books, aiming to generalize the specific principles and strategies for the C-E translation of subject-less sentences in legislative texts, and hoping to provide some hints for the English translation study of Chinese legislative texts.The thesis shows that the Chinese language always values meaning and belittles forms, which is characteristic of topic-orientation; while the English language emphasizes analysis and logic and stresses rigorousness in forms, which is featured by subject-dominance. Such a big individual difference makes the English translation of subject-less sentences tricky. As is presented by a great deal of translation practice, the translator should fully respect the features of English, on the premise of preserving the content and meaning of the original message, and try his efforts to make the translations comply with the usage of subject-predicate structure in English, and if necessary do some adaptations accordingly. Therefore, in the English translation of subject-less sentences in Chinese legislative texts, the translator can adopt the specific skills of adding subjects, translating the active voice into the passive, converting non-subject components into the subjects and using anticipatory “it” in accordance with the principles of reducibility, heteromorphism, and comprehensiveness, so as to achieve equivalence in linguistic functions and legal effects. The author hopes that the thesis might make a tiny contribution to the C-E translation of legislative texts.