Analysis Of Ambiguity In English Parallel Structure—A Translating Report On Health Communication In The 21st Century(Chapter 1-2)

Health communication is believed to be one of the fastest growing pragmatic areas of research in the discipline of communication since its inception in the mid-1970 s.The book,Health Communication in the 21 st Century by Keven Bradley Wright,Lisa Sparks,and H.Dan O' Hair provides an insightful panorama of health communication,including its growth and prospects in future.This report is based on my translation of the first two chapters of this book.Chapter 1 of the book looks back the development of the health communication worldwide.Chapter 2 looks into the causes of medical disputes from providers' and patients' perspectives by examining differences between their perceptions of healthcare,characteristics of provider-patient communication,and successful and unsuccessful outcomes of provider—patient interaction.After reading this book,especially its first two chapters,I found out it features overwhelming employment of parallel structure.Indeed,parallel structure can increase the amount of information sentences accommodate,but it also easily results in ambiguity,and thus creates obstacles for translators.Ambiguity is a subtle but pervasive feature of many languages,and this holds true for English.During translation of the book,I encountered not a few structural ambiguities that posed me great challenges,especially the ambiguity of the parallel structure composing of the conjunction “and”.In terms of approaches to removing ambiguity,translators can first analyze sentence structures in the source text on the basis of contexts,and then try to uncover all the plausible understandings,and finally choose the most equivalent translation.The report first briefs on the definition and classification of English ambiguity with parallel structure ambiguity as the focus.And then it elaborates on the major problems I encountered in the course of translation.It focuses on the analysis of ambiguity and approaches suggested to removing ambiguity,which can boil down to a process of observation,interpretation and production based on contexts,logic as well as syntactical analysis.The detailed and systematic study gives me a deeper understanding of how to translate English parallel structure ambiguity.It is hoped that this study will shed some light on how to deal with English ambiguity in parallel structure for translators.