Translation Strategies On Long Difficult Sentences Of Academic Works In English Linguistics

Chapter 6 and chapter 7 of the linguistics book Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western tradition from Socrates to Saussure(1989), fall into the category of academic works. Thus, the sentences are long and difficult. During the English learning and scientific research work, we need to read more English linguistics academic works. Because not every one of us can understand original academic English books, therefore, it is necessary for us to translate these books into Chinese. Academic books are generally written in formal language, sentences in them are long and complex as well. So, it is very difficult to deal with those long difficult sentences during the translation process.First of all, we should fully understand the long difficult sentences, as Chinese sentences are often concise and short which are different from English. So, there is no doubt that the whole translation process could be difficult, for long difficult sentences' grammar resource are very plentiful, some may contain several parallel clauses, and some may even have complex gradation. I have learned from many scholars' translation skills, and adopted corresponding translation strategies to deal with these long and difficult sentences. I have also summarized four types of translation strategies and three kinds of translating principles namely the principle of faithfulness, the principle of readability, and the principle of relevance.For the commentary part, firstly, I have discussed the translation strategies for the long difficult sentences. Then, I summarized my own translation methods. For example, if the order of English sentences is exactly the same with Chinese, I would not change the structure of original sentence, and just translate the text based on the original order. If the order is different, I would do some corresponding changes to adapt to Chinese readers' reading habits. For the sentences which are too long and the connection between the clauses is not so close, I choose to separate them. Only in this way, can I make the translation more concise and clearer. If the original sentence has implied meaning, I choose to add some content to complement the whole translation, which can make the whole translation intact. Of course, these tactics are not absolutely independent, in order to improve the quality of translation, I always choose several strategies during the translating process.