A Case Study Of Logical Explicitation In The English Translation Of Paratactic Long Sentences In A List Of Investment Projects In Beijing

Hypotactic or paratactic prominence is a major difference between English and Chinese.In presenting logical relations,the difference lies in “implicit cohesion” in Chinese while “explicit cohesion” in English.At the syntactic level,such differences take the form of whether there are logical conjunctions between clauses and whether there are morphological changes.Accordingly,there are two ways for the explicitation of implicit logical relations in Chinese sentences,i.e.,adding conjunctions or connectors and manifesting the morphological changes.Taking the English translation of A List of Investment Projects in Beijing as a case,this research report addresses logical explicitation in the process of translating long sentences in the project text,and explores the specific methods of the two explicitation ways.Analysis of linguistic features indicates that the project text is characterized with concise expressions and long sentences.Accordingly,translation of long sentences will be the focus of this study.In the process of Chinese-English translation,it is important not only to convey all messages in the original text,but also transmit the implicit logical relations in the text accurately and adequately.Two ways of explicate Chinese implicit logical relations are presented,with three methods of logical explicitation used,i.e.,adding conjunctions or connectors,transforming verbs to non-predicate forms and transforming expressions to explicit subordinate clauses.In practice,one certain way of explicitation tends to be insufficient in dealing with a whole long sentence,or rather,a combination of two or three ways is often needed.For the combined use of explicitation methods,three patterns of long sentences in the project text are examined,i.e.,run-on sentences,compound sentences composed of main-subordinate clauses and long sentences with long modifiers.It is hoped that the three methods of logical explicitation and their combination in translation practice as analyzed and applied in this research report can provide operable guide to translators in their job.