On the Translation of Long and Complex English Sentences

Abstract

Since the 1st century AD the translation of Buddhist in China and from the ancient Greece the translation of Bible, a host of masters have published wisdoms and insights on translation according to their practical experience of translating. Various kinds of translation theory such as Eugene Nada’s functional equivalence theory, skopos theory and so on has come out. But a complete work on the analysis of long and complex English translation is very few. Until the early years of 20 century when translation has been defined as a subject of science, long and difficult English sentence began to go into the research scope of scholars. Besides, as it known to all translators, sentence is the ideal unit for English-Chinese translation. Meanwhile, long and complex sentence claims to be the key and most difficult one. Therefore, it is of great necessity for translation workers, especially for the beginners to make a research on the translation of long and complex English sentence. The research on this field is not only a theoretical research with strong practical use but also be of great importance to the comparative analysis of words and phrases between Chinese and English in a macro level. It can also enhance translators to make new breakthroughs in their translation career, which may better cultural exchange among countries and bring more accurate masterpiece for the world. Hence, this paper intends to start from the entry point of the characteristics of long complex English sentences, and then do a in-depths analysis on the reason of translating difficulties further, through which the author hopes that the reader can get a clear understanding of the impact on the user’s thinking style made by different language and the difference in phrases and sentence structures of diverse language family. Thus, all the learner learn it and memorized it by heart. In the end, the author is, through her continuous practice and paint experience, willing to conclude a more clear steps and methods of translation. Last but not least, what matters to the ability of translation is rely on the translator’s persistent hardworking. All the translation work lovers should better make further efforts under the instruction of correct theory direction.