A Contrastive Study Of English & Chinese Sentence Structure In Contemporary Legislation And E-C Translation

In view of the fact that there are so few theories or studies on E-C and C-E legislative translation that numerous problems arises only to find no sensible explanation, the author takes the lead in contrasting English and Chinese sentence structure.Guided by the methodology of contrastive analysis, he has compared in this thesis the contemporary English and Chinese legislative sentence in the level of phrase and sentence structure. He finds that English and Chinese both share similarities and yield disparities in expressing the same legal tenor. In the level of phrase, the author elaborates on the English predominant phrase - noun phrase and contrasts it with Chinese. He finds that English premodifiers and postmodifiers are expressed flexibly, but modifiers in Chinese are invariably placed before head nouns. Chinese noun modifiers are often expressed with endocentric phrases. However, Chinese has various ways to express English noun modifiers in legislation, apart from endocentric phrases. In the level of sentence, the author looks legislative sentence into the logical elements, which are distinctive of legislation. He has managed to figure out how these elements are expressed in a sentence, and what a sentence should be like when these elements are put together. He finds that English legislative sentence shares similar (but not the same) logical elements with Chinese. But English and Chinese are obviously different in expression. Graphic is a formulaic type of sentence frequent in Chinese and popular in contemporary English legislation. The biggest difference between English graphics and Chinese graphics consists in then-sentence structure: An English graphic is usually long and contains no more than one sentence and, grammatically, the paralleled items are undividable parts from the heading; while a Chinese graphic may contain numerous sentences, the heading and the paralleled items, which are relatively independent, are only logically connected, but grammatically dividable. It is proved that all the findings are applicable to E-C translation.The author believes that this pioneering thesis can throw out a brick to attract a jade, and more and more attention would turn to legislative translation.