英汉翻译论文

English-Chinses Translation

09英语4班

许芯铜

200915310432

Qinggong College

Hebei United University

October , 2011

The Comparison between English and Chinese

I.Synthetic VS Analytic

A synthetic language is characterized by frequent and systematic use of inflected forms to express grammatical relationships.

An analytic language is marked by a relatively frequent use of functions words, auxiliary verbs, and charges in word order to express syntactic relations, rather than of inflected forms.

English is a synthetic-analytic language.

Chinese is a typical analytic language.

1.In English nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected, Chinese is

non-inflectional. The above grammatical meanings are mostly implied in contexts or between the lines.

Eg. He moved astonishingly fast.

He moved with astonishing rapidity.

His movements were astonishingly rapidity.

His rapid movements astonished us.

His movements astonished us by their rapidity.

The rapidity of his movements was astonishing.

The rapidity with which he moved astonished us.

He astonished us by moving rapidly.

He astonished us by his rapid movements.

He astonished us by the rapidity of his movements.(Jespersen 1924)

他的行动，快得惊人。

他行动的速度快得令人惊讶。

他行动速度之快，令人惊讶。

他的快速行动使我们感到惊讶。

我们对他的快速行动感到惊讶。

The English inflection, though few in numbers, are an integral and essential part of the language. The excessive frequency of these forms gives them great morphological weight. We cannot but accept Sayce’s dictum, “once inflectional, always inflectional”. Hence, while English appears as almost uninflectional when compared with such a language as Latin, it appears in the opposite light when compared with an isolating language such as Chinese.

2. Word order in English is not so rigid as in Chinese. More ways of inversion, grammatical or rhetorical are often seen in English.

The flexible word order in English is mainly the result of the grammatical concord of words in the sentence which is achieved by inflection.

When expressing temporal or logical sequences, English may make full use of inflections and function words to make its word order flexible, while Chinese, with the help of function words, arranges its word order according to certain rules of temporal or logical sequences.

3. English functions words include the articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, coordinators and subordinators, while Chinese function words include particles, connectives, and prepositions. Each has its own features in the use of these words.

Chinese is rich in particles, which can be classified into aspect particles, structural particles, and emotional particles. The frequent use of Chinese particles is a hard nut for foreign learners of Chinese.

Eg. 这回我可亲眼看见啦！This time I’ve actually seen it for myself. English has a large number of prepositions and prepositional phrases which are often in use, which Chinese has a few prepositions which are mostly “borrowed” from their corresponding verbs. A conversion of English perversion of English prepositions into Chinese verbs is often necessary.

Eg. Peter drew his knife on the robber. 彼得拔刀向那个强盗砍去。

4. English frequently uses its various connectives, coordinating or subordinating, including conjunctive and relative pronouns or adverbs, such as who, whose, that, what, which, when, where, why, and how. Chinese has no such kind of conjunctives and relatives, and other connectives are not often used, except in formal writings.

Eg. Practically all substances expand when heated and contract when cooled. 几乎所有的物质都是热胀冷缩的。

English is an intonation language while Chinese is a tone language. One of the important features in modern Chinese is the predominance of disyllables and quadrisyllables over monosyllables and trisyllables. As a result, reduplication of characters, repetition of words, four-character expressions, and parallelism of syllables, words, phrases, and sentence structures have popular Chinese grammatical and rhetorical devices.

II. Rigid VS Supple

English subject-predicate structure appears rigid as a result of certain grammatical bonds, including the patternization and the principles of grammatical and notional concord.

Chinese, however, is relatively free from the government of S-V concord and formal markers. The subject-predicate structure is usually varied, flexible, and therefore complicated and supple.

Eg. He has a daughter, who works in Beijing. Someone has phoned her and it is said that she will be back tomorrow.

他有个女儿，在北京工作，已经打电话过去了，听说明天就能回来。

More ambiguity can be found in Chinese due to the lack of connectives, inflections and other grammatical markers.

1.他欠你的钱（他+欠你钱/他欠你的+钱）

2.准备了两年的食物（准备了两年的+食物/准备了+两年的食物）

III. Hypotactic VS Paratactic

Hypotaxis is the dependent or subordinate construction or relationship of clauses with connectives, for examp le, I shall despair if you don’t come. English sentence building is featured by hypotaxis.