On The Translation Of Long Sentences From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation

The Idea Brokers is written to introduce the development of American think tanks in the 20th century.According to the text types theory put forward by Peter Newmark,this book is classified as an informative text.He suggested translators follow the principles of communicative translation.Long sentences are notable in the book and pose a grave challenge to translators.Drawing on the insights of communicative translation and from the perspectives of nominal structure,prepositional structure and sentence structure,this paper attempts to explore how to deal with the difficulties in translating those long sentences and to achieve the intended communicative purpose.Communicative translation emphasizes readers' experience and the accurate communication of the original information to target readers.It requires that both the content and language of the original should be readily acceptable and comprehensible to the readership.Translators are advised to observe the following principles.Target readers should always be the priority;the language form of the original text should be preserved if it doesn't hinder the conveyance of information and affect readers' experience;otherwise,the original form should give way to the form familiar to the target readers;any foreign elements should be replaced by expressions known to them as they expect the translation to be simple and understandable;the translation can be better than the original text.Based on the translation of chapter 4 in The Idea Brokers,the author maintains that when rendering long English sentences in informative text into Chinese,translators are advised to follow the above-mentioned principles and adopt the target language form,working to ensure that target readers acquire reading experience as close as possible to that obtained by the readers of the original text.Nominal structure is preferred in English sentences,while verbs are more frequently used in Chinese.The frequent use of nouns might lead to the rise in the number of prepositions needed.In order to make the translation readily comprehensive for Chinese readers,translators should translate English nouns into Chinese verbs.Meanwhile,translators should make explicit the contextual meanings of the prepositions and find similar expressions in the target language for foreign elements.Because of the differences in the sentence structure between Chinese and English,translators often need to break the original structure and translate a long English sentence into several short Chinese sentences.