Kernel Sentence Analysis In English-chinese Translation Of Long Sentences

The source text comes from chapter six Rock Oil,Civil War and Industrial Slavery Interrupted of American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light,1750-1865,an academic work about American history.The text selected presents readers a panoramic view of the characters and events in a certain historical period through a series of events.The source text has abundant long sentences featured by sophisticated structures,dense information and rigorous logic.The meanings of every part of one long sentence are closely intertwined and connected with each other.In addition,there are numerous deep meanings hidden behind the surface structure,which posed difficulties to the transformation of the actual meanings.Thus,how to deal with those long and difficult sentences correctly and appropriately is quite significant for the translation work.Thus,this thesis chooses the translation of long sentences as the focus of the research.Firstly,the characteristics and difficulties of the long sentences selected are summarized and analyzed.The study of long sentences translation and the common practice of dealing with long sentences are reviewed.It is found that Nida’s kernel sentence analysis may be helpful for this particular problem.Next,the kernel sentence analysis theory is reviewed and applied to the long and difficult sentences.The analysis and translation practice produce the following findings.From the lexical perspective,the long sentences could be split into a few kernel sentences based on the kernel words.The semantic meanings of the kernel words are redefined according to the seven different semantic categories proposed by Nida,and then making nouns or participles dynamic can help express the deep meaning of the sentences.From the syntactical perspective,the kernel sentences could be reorganized into a complete,precise and fluent Chinese sentence with the assistance of precondition preposing or conclusion postposing.But these operations should be based on the understanding of the meaning and the logic of the source sentence.In conclusion,the translation practice has proved that the vocabulary and sentence-level operations proposed in this research have a practical guiding role in translating long sentences in historical texts.