On Chinese-English Translation Skills Of Chinese Subject-predicate Construction

This study focuses on the English translation skills of Chinese subject-predicate construction,which refers to the sentence pattern that consists of two subject-predicate structures---the main subject-predicate structure of the whole sentence and a second subject-predicate structure acting as the predicate of the sentence.The subject-predicate construction is a unique and pervasive linguistics structure in the Chinese language but does not have its corresponding counterpart in English,which,to some degree,poses an unavoidable challenge to the English translation of this construction.To solve this problem,this study first makes an attempt to discuss the scope of the subject-predicate construction,i.e.,what kinds of subject-predicate construction are there available in the Chinese language.Following the analysis of both the syntactic and semantic structure of the subject-predicate construction,this study proceeds to review the scope of this construction represented by other linguists.It is noticed that the kind that S~1 or S~2 is a noun of time or place also falls into the category of the subject-predicate construction in accordance with the study of the development of Chinese language.And therefore,the seven kinds of the subject-predicate construction are classified as follows:(1)S~1 and S~2 as possessor and possessee,or,whole and part;(2)S~1 or S~2 as nouns of time or place;(3)S~1 or S~2 as the patient of P~2;(4)S~1 as the dative or a tool;(5)S~1 and S~2 as loosely-related parts;(6)S~1 or S~2 as a verb phrase;(7)S~1 as a phrase indicating a universal meaning.On the basis of that,this study continues to explore the establishment of the subject-predicate construction with Construction Grammar as the theoretical foundation.This study first concludes that the subject-predicate construction falls into the category of Constructions that carries meaning,independently of the words in the sentence concerned.Furthermore,with the exploration of the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic bases of the subject-predicate construction,this paper claims that the S-P structure can serve as different syntactic components,including the predicate of a sentence.What is more,as a typical semantic language,the syntactic structure of Chinese is based on order.From the perspective of cognition order,the given information is usually the point where humans start to illustrate and to touch on new information.To express the new information,our minds will first set up a semantic chain.If the S-P structure acting as the new information is used to illustrate the given information(NP),then the NP and the S-P structure can be integrated into a complex sentence through their semantic relations.Consequently,the subject-predicate construction is established.On the basis of that,this study makes attempts to respectively analyze the translation skills of each kind of the construction,and several skills have been concluded,such as stressing the tone,separating the meaning,adding words,etc.To recapitulate,this study,on the basis of Construction Grammar,explores the establishment of the subject-predicate construction and concludes the English translation skills for each kind of the construction.It is hoped that it can shed some light on the Cognitive Linguistics research,the foreign languages teaching&research,and also on the translation study.