Translating Parenthesis From English To Chinese

Parenthesis is commonly used in English writing,usually as a word,phrase or clause inserted into a passage to express the meaning of addition,explanation,conclusion,etc.In English to Chinese translation,parenthesis is difficult to deal with for translators.If they ignore it,a loss in the sentence meaning may be caused.But if they endeavor to translate it,it may supersede what really counts in the original sentence.As a result,many translators copy the original sentence order directly,leading to unsatisfactory target texts that are not idiomatic at all.Scholars at home and abroad have done plenty of researches on English parenthesis,mainly concentrating on its syntax,semantics and pragmatics.But few of them have studied techniques for parenthesis translation from English to Chinese and the existing techniques proposed are not systematic enough.This thesis aims to discuss parenthesis translation,or how to transfer English parenthesis into Chinese in a satisfactory way.It means that the target text should share the same meaning with the original while being readable and idiomatic enough in Chinese so that Chinese readers can better understand the knowledge expressed and the original writer's way of argumentation.This thesis discusses parenthesis translation based on the case study of the translation of The Psychology of Self-Esteem.This is an academic text,in which the writer frequently employs parenthesis structures,making the book a little difficult to translate.In the case study,parentheses in the book are divided into eight types according to translation methods.The existing six parenthesis translation methods are used to guide the practice and they are discussed in terms of proper occasions for application respectively.On this basis,two more new methods are proposed in this thesis:adding words and referring to the whole context.It is hoped that this thesis can provide inspirations for later scholars in parenthesis translation.