A Report On E/C Translation Of Long Sentences In Academic Literature From The Perspective Of Rhetorical Structure Theory

This paper,based on the Rhetorical Structure Theory(RST),discusses the translation strategies of long sentences in academic translation with the case study of translation of three academic writings on the topic of visual metaphor.Long sentence translation has always been a challenge in English-Chinese translation.Belonging to different language families,Chinese and English,vary in sentence structure,particularly in long sentence structure due to the fact that Chinese tends to be parataxis,and English to be hypotaxis as far as structure variation is concerned.The difference can be further elaborated.Chinese is more like a bamboo with each sentence element interlocking with one another,however,English is more like a tree,with a trunk in the middle and branches agglutinated around.It is hard to master the differences on structure,so the author uses the Rhetorical Structure Theory(RST)to solve the problems in the translation of long sentences.The report has verified that for the translation of long sentences in academic literature,RST,which is able to visualize,structurize and stratify the implicit logic relationship,can be used to make clear the cohesion and coherence on the syntactic level.Following the theory of RST,some related translation methods are applied and proved to be effective in translating those long sentences,such as division,restructuring and supplementary method.Despite of the fact that this thesis only examines the translation of long sentences in three academic writings,it will still make some contributions to the translation of other academic writings.