Strategies For Translating Long And Complex Sentences From English Into Chinese

Professor Nancy Henry’s famous book The Life of George Eliot:A Critical Biography is characterized by numerous long and complex English sentences.How to translate them is a difficulty encountered by the author during the course of translation.This report,based on the translation of the fourth chapter of this book,analyzes the translation methods of long and complex English sentences with the help of the translation skills proposed by Liu Miqing.Meanwhile,the goal of maintaining the writing style of the original work should be realized.Long and complex English sentences,usually consisting of many modifiers,parallel structures and subordinate clauses,are generally more complicated than other sentences.Therefore,translating long and complex sentences from English into Chinese has always been a challenge for translators.If long and complex English sentences cannot be dealt with well,readers then will fail in enjoying translation works.Although lots of scholars have achieved great fruits on this topic after hard work,it is still worthwhile to study how to translate long and complex sentences further.The main research question of this thesis is the translation methods of long and complex English sentences.Liu Miqing put forward six methods of translating long and complex English sentences:Embedding,Cutting,Reversing,Splitting-off,Inserting and Recasting.However,through the analysis,this study finds that most of the long and complex sentences in The Life of George Eliot:A Critical Biography can be solved by adopting four of the translation methods "Embedding,Cutting,Reversing and Inserting" proposed by Liu Miqing.The four translation methods can help to convey the basic information of the biography and meanwhile to show its writing style.